Stop at Nothing

PART FIVE

Applause rang out in the main chamber of Singapore’s Parliament House, a modernist building with a prism-shaped roof situated across the Singapore River from Raffle’s Place.

President Ellen Abrams breathed a sigh of satisfaction as she held the gold fountain pen and finally signed the Mutual Defence Treaty, which had now been re-modified to include a tripartite agreement involving the People’s Republic of China.

After her agent’s attempted assassination attempt and Mark Cole’s timely intervention and information, Abrams had managed to open up Danko and Feng enough to listen to her story.

To their credit, they had listened, and the three leaders had met soon after to discuss in depth what had happened, to establish the sequence of events, how things got out of hand so quickly, and what could be done in the future to ensure such a situation would not arise again.

Russia and China sent over investigative teams of their own, and Abrams’ version of events was finally accepted by all sides — it had been an internal coup, arranged by Vice Admiral Charles Hansard.

It was decided by all three countries to cover up what had actually happened — better that the world never knew anything about it. When the various members of Hansard’s group were located — some just asleep in bed, confident they would never be caught, others trying desperately to leave the country — they were offered plea bargains. They were forced to resign their positions, in return for secret confessions of their roles, and such information was critical in convincing Danko and Feng about what had really happened.

Because the entire incident was being covered up, the reason for those people leaving their positions was given as merely part of a general reshuffle of the US administration on Abrams’ part, due on the one hand to the assassination attempt on her life — which had been blamed on Mancini as a crazed, lone assassin — and on the other to the changing global power structure.

As the members of Hansard’s alumni left their powerful positions, it was seen around the world as nothing more than the usual political manoueveruing. Those business men and women in the group were also forced to resign from their respective companies, and a variety of false reasons were given for these resignations, none of which aroused the least bit of suspicion from the world’s press.

The group needed to be punished on some level though — and although many in the US, Russian and Chinese governments felt that some ‘accident’ should befall them, it was decided that this would perhaps not be wise in the long run.

Instead, the members’ assets and business interests were seized secretly, out of the eyes of the press, with near to two billion dollars of personal wealth being rescinded to the US government, which dispersed a large sum as compensation to the families of those killed in the attacks in Sweden, and put the rest towards administration costs for the tri-nation pact that was now being signed.

Abrams smiled as she sat back down in her straight-backed leather chair, watching as President Danko approached the gilded lectern to add his own signature to the treaty document. It pleased her immensely that the Alumni’s personal money, instead of helping fund, and then being heavily increased by, a new Cold War, was instead helping to bankroll a Mutual Defence Treaty between the three concerned nations.

As Danko moved to the side and President Feng took to the lectern, Abrams’ thoughts drifted back to the Alumni, and to Vice Admiral Charles Hansard. It was frustrating in the extreme that the man had not yet been found, despite the best efforts of the US, Russia and China. Their police and intelligence services had spent the last few months scouring the known world for the fugitive, but to no avail. It was as if he had simply vanished into thin air.

Abrams also thought it was regretful that Mark Cole — or ‘the Asset’ as he had been known to her all these years — seemed to have perished in Austria whilst trying to rescue his family. She had actually cried when the report had come through. It wasn’t just that he had saved her life; he had postponed reaching his own family to do so, and Abrams couldn’t help but feel partially responsible for their deaths.

The Force Recon team had got there too late. They had been armed and ready to go in hard, but on arrival they had discovered the whole place swarming with police and other emergency services, the house totally razed to the ground.

They had therefore left their weapons behind and walked in unarmed, showing their military credentials to the men at the police barrier. They had been allowed in and wandered about the site, noting the parachute canopy lying on the garden lawn, the six dead men in the tree line, the six spread around outside the house, empty cartridge cases littering the grounds.

Upon coming to the house, it was clear that evidence wouldn’t be quickly forthcoming; the onsite crime scene investigators told them that there were traces of a variety of different body parts throughout the burnt and collapsed structure, but due to the temperatures involved, it was doubtful whether they would ever be completely sure about who had been inside.

Further investigation back in the United States had shown Cole to be a diving instructor living in the Cayman Islands, but Abrams knew who he really was. The Asset was the United States’ own spearhead warrior, a top-secret resource that had been used as a precision weapon by the nation for many years.

It was a shame, she thought as she stood once more; he had been a good man.

But all three leaders were on the podium now, shaking hands and exchanging kisses on the cheek as the world’s press filmed and took pictures; for it was the most important treaty signing they had witnessed in their lifetimes, and one that would help ensure a more stable world in a more promising future.

Jerry Adams spat at the images on the television screen, disgust written plain across his face.

‘Sons of bitches!’ he shouted, slamming his fist on the wine table next to him, toppling his champagne flute.

The others in the room hardly noticed his outburst, as they all felt exactly the same way; it was their money that was funding this travesty! And now they had been left almost penniless, in a country — their country — that had climbed into bed with two age-old enemies!

All of the ten remaining members of the Alumni were gathered together in the Villa Beach Suite of the Hilton Cancun. They had been arriving throughout the morning, and some had already been drinking heavily as they watched the continuous press coverage of the Mutual Defence Treaty signing.

Their lives since New Year had been hell — they had lost their major assets, their business holdings, even money straight from their bank accounts. Forced out of their jobs, some had been forced to sell their houses, others their cars.

As nothing was known of their involvement in the recent goings-on, they were still making money on the after-dinner speech circuit, and some had written autobiographies; but the bottom line was that two hundred thousand a year was far, far removed from the billions they used to have, and the tens of billions more they had hoped to get in the very near future.

They had not met, seen or even spoken to each other since that last meeting before Mancini’s failed assassination attempt, but had all agreed to fly to Cancun in order to meet with Charles Hansard.

Nobody in the group knew where Hansard had gone, or how he had escaped detection; all they knew was that he had recently contacted them on their secure communications network, sending an encrypted message for them to travel directly to the Hilton in the famous Mexico beach resort of Cancun.

He had not said what the meeting would be about, but hearing from him after so long had piqued the group’s interest, and they had all come as summoned.

As the hours dragged on, and the TV coverage continued, and the drink finally ran dry, there was just one problem — Vice Admiral Charles Hansard was still nowhere to be seen.

Charles Hansard put the newspaper down on the trestle table by his side and sighed, before picking up his glass and finishing off the remains of the brandy.

The article had gone on to list the names of the victims, and then gave brief biographies for each. Hansard had not had to read on — he had known each individual man and woman in the room, each one a part of his glorious Alumni group, each one now dead.

What had caused them to travel to Mexico and meet up? Hansard smelled a rat, and immediately thought that it must have been a US military operation, disguised as an accident. It wasn’t enough that they had stolen the group’s money and used it to create a communist love-in with those red bastards in Russia and China; they — or rather she, as it was doubtless that bitch Abrams who had ordered it — also wanted the entire group dead. It might have been the sort of job Cole would have done, Hansard thought as he packed his pipe, except the fact that Cole was dead too.

It convinced Hansard that he had done the right thing in fleeing — or as he liked to think of it, engaging in a tactical retreat. Being the mastermind behind the whole thing, Hansard would have been persecuted by the US government and hung out to dry, and they would probably have convinced Hansard’s old comrades to testify against him in a closed court. Jail would have been the best he could have hoped for, with death the more likely outcome — as evidenced by the recent event in Mexico.

Hansard had therefore used a large chunk of his personal fortune — acting before the US government was able to seize any of it — to buy his way into the closed, secretive world of Burma. The ruling military junta was known for its ability to keep a secret, so long as the price was right, and Hansard had paid a handsome price. He had even been able to bring his private aide, Nicholas Stern, who would doubtless make Hansard’s own life easier by acting as the go-between for the greasy bastards who ran the country.

Thinking of Nicholas, Hansard remembered that he had been a little too long in the kitchen — the bottle was now empty on the table, and he had asked Stern to bring another.

‘Nicholas?’ he called through the house, the atmosphere thick as the wooden ceiling fans fought a losing battle against the tropical heat and humidity.

There was no answer, and so finally Hansard pushed himself out of his rattan chair, wiping his brow as he moved slowly towards the kitchen.

Burma wasn’t the worst place in the world, he thought, at least if you had money. The lush vegetation of the mountain highlands was sublime in its beauty, and the generals could get you anything you asked for.

If he was going to stay here permanently, though, he thought as he wiped his brow yet again, he was going to have to get some air conditioning installed in this old colonial manor.

Still thinking about putting in a request for the work, Hansard strolled into the kitchen and saw the body at his feet, lying sprawled and unconscious on the bamboo floor. It was Stern.

Hansard turned slowly back round, and saw him.

Mark Cole sat in the rattan chair, eyes burning coals in a badly scarred face.

‘Mark,’ Hansard began. ‘Well, well, this is a surprise. I thought you were dead.’

‘Not for the first time,’ Cole said through his flame-scarred lips.

‘No,’ Hansard agreed as he walked back towards him, ‘not for the first time.’

Cole stood, and now Hansard could see the full extent of his injuries, his skin ravaged by burns from the top of his left temple down the side of his face to his neck, and across the part of his chest Hansard could see under the white cotton shirt he wore.

‘You don’t look so good,’ Hansard commented.

‘My family look worse,’ Cole replied, the coals in his eyes flickering with a fire of their own. ‘I’m not even going to ask why. It doesn’t matter,’ Cole said in a flat monotone.

Hansard opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it. The man had already killed the rest of Hansard’s Alumni — for since Cole was alive, surely it would have been him in Mexico — and Hansard had no wish to join them. So for now, he would do as the man said.

But suddenly, Cole reached out towards him, touching his neck, his temple, his elbow and his chest, all in rapid succession, pecking with his fingertips like the beak of a bird.

‘You’re probably thinking of how to negotiate this,’ Cole said, copying the words of Albright back in Austria. ‘The trouble is, there is no way.’ Cole grinned, but there was no humour, only the promise of death. ‘Punishment for destroying my family.’

And with that, Cole pushed past Hansard, walking casually towards the screen door at the far side of the room.

Hansard watched him, confused; what had just happened? But he knew he couldn’t let Cole leave alive, and so he withdrew the short-barrelled semiautomatic pistol from the shoulder holster he wore under his tropical-weight cotton jacket and raised it at Cole, centring it on the man’s back.

As Cole reached the door, Hansard’s finger tried to squeeze the trigger, but nothing happened; he tried again, but still nothing.

In fact, Hansard could not move at all, paralysed, rooted to the spot and unable to control any muscle in his body.

Of the 107 vital points of the deadly art of marma adi, four of Charles Hansard’s had just been struck in the pattern known as Śiva kā śāpa, the curse of Shiva.

Forbidden even within the art itself, the curse of Shiva interrupted the blood flow of the victim’s lower body and channelled it back up to the heart, where it was then forced upwards through the vital organs and up into the brain.

The pain started instantly, and Hansard’s legs shook as they drained of blood, collapsing his body to the floor. He choked and coughed as the pain continued through his core, and he felt hot liquid in his anus, and he knew it was blood.

He coughed again, the pain so intense he couldn’t even scream, even though he wanted for anything in the world to be able to let out a piercing, shrieking yell, crying with all his might at his agony.

And yet his screams had to be swallowed, and then he watched as blood leaked from his ears onto the bamboo floorboards, the pain even more intense now, causing green bile and vomit to eject from his mouth, even as his vision turned red and he felt warm blood pour from his eyes, down his face onto the floor, his head sticking to the floorboards.

It felt like every part of his body was on fire, each piece of him pierced with needles and pulled apart, and yet he still could not scream.

Hansard coughed again — once, twice, and then blood sprayed out of his mouth in a fine red mist, covering the floor in front of him.

His body convulsed — again once, twice, and then the blood being forced into the brain finally did its work and the brain haemorrhaged, expanding outwards until the skull cracked open, the dark grey matter spilling out of the tiny fissures even as his eyeballs were forced from their sockets.

And then the body stopped moving, and Vice Admiral Charles Hansard was dead.

Outside, Cole breathed the tropical jungle air into his lungs.

It was done.