Cole had assumed it was a mistake; maybe the girl had thought he was somebody else, and when she’d realized, had fled. He’d thought nothing else about it, his mind on other things.
But now here she was again, the same girl, beaten and broken, another captive of Haynes and Aryan Ultra.
Who was she?
Another grin spread across Haynes’ face. ‘Surprised?’ he asked. ‘Little Michiko here is how we found out about you. How’s that for betrayal, eh? But she did have some encouragement,’ he laughed. ‘Amazing what a little pain will do to someone’s loyalty, ain’t it?’
Haynes saw the pigs approaching Cole’s feet more aggressively, and motioned for his men to pull them back before he continued. ‘We saw her come visit you in San Quentin, wondered why a fuckin’ nip would come visitin’ a true-blooded Aryan like you. So we followed her, finally picked her up. Questioned her.’ He smiled that sick, black smile. ‘You’d have been proud of her. Really. She held out for a long time. But everyone talks in the end.’
Cole looked at the girl, barely strong enough to stand, upright only because Groves was holding her.
Confusion flooded Cole’s mind.
He had no idea who the girl was, how she knew anything about him at all, never mind the deepest, darkest secrets of his identity. So she had resisted as much as she could before telling them, and Cole was grateful. But who was she, and why did she know so much about him in the first place?
It was clear that Haynes believed that they were connected in some close way; Cole knew that she would be tortured in front of him, to get him to talk. Haynes must have thought that the sight of the girl being eaten by the pigs would cause him to give in, to tell everything he knew.
But Haynes was wrong; it wasn’t going to encourage him to talk.
On the contrary, it was enough to give him the adrenalin boost he needed, the savage impetus to act.
2
The pain that wracked Aoki ‘Yamaguchi’ Michiko was intense; she had been beaten black and blue over the course of several days.
And now she was going to be fed to the pigs to encourage Mark Cole to talk.
Like she had talked.
Her head hung limply on her chest in shame.
As a member — disgraced and estranged, but still a member — of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest and most feared Yakuza crime family, Aoki knew that informing was the worst possible sin, one that often resulted in the informer’s murder or forced ritual suicide.
The fact that she’d had no choice made no difference; she had failed, and it was as simple as that.
She still couldn’t believe that she had not sat down in that visitor’s room in San Quentin; after all these years of tracking Cole, delving into his past, thinking he was dead, then tracking him again, she had at last gained the chance to sit down with him and confront him once and for all.
She knew everything there was to know about Mark Cole, the ex-Navy SEAL originally called Mark Antoni Kowalski who hailed from the Polish enclave of Hamtramck, near Detroit. His early background and life with his third-generation immigrant family, his years in SEAL Team Two, then SEAL Team Six, his engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq, and on secret wars around the world, his recruitment into the highly covert Systems Research Group, his capture and imprisonment in Pakistan, his subsequent release and change of identity to Mark Cole, his years of service to the US government as a paid assassin, his betrayal by his controller Charles Hansard, the Director of National Intelligence, the brutal deaths of his wife and two small children, his reappearance months later after being presumed dead.
Aoki, having stood and watched the fires still burning at the hamlet of Kreith in Austria where his family died, where he was supposed to have died, had been shocked to her core when she’d seen him alive two years later on the streets of Paris.
She had resumed her search, used her formidable computer hacking skills to discover his new role in the US government as the leader of a special unit known as Force One.
She had discovered details of his latest mission, infiltrating Aryan Ultra through the US prison system, and had finally tracked him to San Quentin penitentiary.
And then — after all these years, so many false leads, so many missed opportunities — she had finally come so close to meeting him face to face; she could have sat down and finally confronted him, demanded answers from him for what he’d done.
But at the last minute she’d backed out, suddenly afraid to meet him, to look into his face, into his eyes; what would she see there? What would he see in her face?
It had been too much for her, and the whole thing had abruptly threatened to crush her, overwhelm her, drown her.
And instead of confronting him as she had dreamed of for so many years, instead she had run.
Just one more reason, she decided, to be disgusted with herself. As a Yamaguchi, the shame was intolerable.
But, she reminded herself, she wasn’t a true Yamaguchi; she was no more a part of the criminal underworld than she was of the world of secret intelligence. She was an imposter in both arenas, forever searching for… what?
She didn’t know, and as she watched the pigs turn from Cole and come scuttling across the barn floor to her, she wondered if she ever would.
It had been stupid of her to be caught, she knew that now; she should have been aware of the people around her, attuned to people that might be watching her.
But she had been so focused on Cole, and then so confused after fleeing from the prison without even speaking to him, that she never noticed the men who had followed her, stalked her every move.
When they had moved in she had fought back — just as she had been trained — and had even damaged several of the hardened men; but in the end there had been too many, and she had been bound and bundled and crated off to this ranch in the Arizona desert.
The ensuing days had been the worst of her young life; beaten, burnt, drugged and abused. She had held out for as long as any human being could hope to do under such conditions, but finally she had broken and told them everything.
Logically she knew she had been left with no choice, but she couldn’t help hating herself for what she had done.
And now?
She looked across to Mark Cole, aware that this might constitute their first real meeting, almost smiling with the irony of it all.
Now? she thought sadly.
Now they were both going to die.
The pigs were moving over towards the girl now, encouraged by Haynes’ thugs; but against all of his instincts, Cole began to wriggle his toes, trying to attract the attention of the animals, to get at least one to stay close to him. All he needed was one.
He turned his head sharply, his eyes darting over the girl’s shoulder, past Haynes and Groves to beyond the big barn doors behind them.
Everyone in the room instinctively followed his gaze; it was the oldest trick in the book, but Cole was a master and could play the game as well as anyone.
In the moment when everyone’s attention was distracted, Cole hauled up hard on the rope that held him, curling his body up high in the air until he could fasten his bare feet on the rope above his hands. Pushing with his powerful leg muscles, he jerked his bound hands upwards off the hook, turned around and landed on the barn floor, ankles, knees and hips flexing to reduce the impact.