Free PLEDGE OF HONOR: A Mark Cole Thriller by J.T. Brannan Page B

of Hansard’s hit-teams was already there waiting for him.
    He’d taken out the trained killers that guarded the house, but had been unable to stop one of Hansard’s men – the psychopathic Dan Albright – from killing his wife and children, right in front of him.
    He shook his head sadly, finished the coffee and tossed the Styrofoam cup into a trash can.
    So much pain.
    He’d taken his revenge, of course; killed Steinmeier, Albright, and even Hansard eventually; but it had never been able to fill the tragic hole that had been ripped in his heart, his soul.
    He’d been a broken man for a time, worked as a bouncer in strip clubs and go-go bars in Thailand, tried to lose himself in the pain of a hundred beatings, allowed himself to be a human punch bag to make up for what had happened, for not being good enough to save his family.
    But eventually, he had fought back, rediscovered the beast inside him, and had come to a realization; a normal life was not for him, not anything he should ever have tried to find. He was a killer, a predator, born for violence and death.
    But whether it was from his Catholic upbringing, or his early military life, he had believed in using that violence to help others, the sheep dog versus the wolf.  His job was to protect the sheep, not to terrorize them. Hansard might have misused his skills, but they were the only skills he had, and his only choice was to use them for what he believed to be the common good.
    That purpose was now ultimately being used within Force One, and he was at last satisfied, both with his life, and his nature.
    He’d also been blessed with another daughter, a connection to family that he thought he could never have again. Michiko was a blessing, he knew that; and he also knew that he had to keep her safe, to make sure that the same fate that befell his last family would be spared her.
    He had brought her close, so he could keep an eye on her, could protect her. But she was a headstrong girl, and Cole knew that she was keen to get some operational experience with Force One, use her technical skills on the ground. It was something that she had asked often of him, and something he had always turned down, citing the fact that security considerations wouldn’t allow her to join the unit. But the fact was that he was scared that something would happen to her, and wanted her somewhere safe, behind a computer.
    But at the back of his mind, his understanding of human nature told him that she wouldn’t stay still for long; she had a taste for adventure like her father’s, and the thought terrified him.
    He shook his head to clear his thoughts, took one last look at the cold river before him, and turned his back to it, leaving it behind along with its memories and moving forward instead, to a rendezvous at Thames House.

9
    Thames House was an imposing place, an Imperial Neoclassical office block made of Portland stone, like many of London’s finest buildings. Nearly a hundred years old, it had been described in the 1930s as ‘the finest office building in the British Empire’, and Cole could see why.
    There were three major intelligence services in the UK. MI6, more properly known as the Secret Intelligence Service, performed the same function of foreign intelligence gathering as the American CIA, and was housed in the familiar stepped ziggurat building at Vauxhall Cross on the other side of the River Thames. Government Communications Headquarters worked closely with America’s National Security Agency; responsible for electronic and signals intelligence, it occupied ‘The Doughnut’, an iconic donut-shaped building in the suburbs of Cheltenham, a hundred miles from London. The Security Service – commonly known as MI5, due to its World War I designation as the Directorate of Military Intelligence Section 5 – dealt with internal security, including counter-espionage, counter-terrorism, and the protection of British parliamentary democracy and economic interests. It