The Nazi’s Son – sample chapters

Prologue

Saturday, April 5, 1986

West Berlin

The KGB officer pulled out a half-empty pack of his favorite Belomorkanal cigarettes from his jacket pocket and put one in his mouth. He offered one to his colleague, who was standing on the darkened balcony beside him. She accepted. He lit both using a cheap red plastic lighter, cupping his hands around it to prevent the breeze from extinguishing the flame.

He shivered as he took a deep drag on the cigarette, which glowed bright. The nicotine hit felt good. They were standing on the sixth story of an apartment building overlooking Hauptstrasse, the main street running through the Friedenau district of West Berlin. Across the street, high up on the soaring brick tower of the town hall, a giant illuminated clock read quarter to two in the morning.

The two Russians smoked in silence for a few minutes.

“Skoro sluchitsya,” the woman eventually said in her native language. It’s coming soon.

The man nodded. “Oni uzhe opozdali.” They’re already late.

On the sidewalk far below the KGB apartment where they had been staying undercover for the previous few days, a group of West Berlin youngsters staggered along, laughing and drunkenly trying to support each other. He had watched as they emerged from the entrance of a nightclub, more than two hundred meters from their vantage point. A red-and-white sign above the door read La Belle Disco Club.

La Belle was on the ground floor of the four-story art deco–style Roxy Palast building that had originally been a cinema. At this hour it would be packed with hundreds of music and dance lovers writhing to the latest American sounds, some of which were not yet even available in West Berlin’s record stores.

A few minutes later, another group emerged from the club, walked along the street, and climbed into a car. From the way they looked and dressed, the KGB officer knew they were United States soldiers. The club, southwest of Berlin’s center, was very popular with American servicemen stationed in the city.

On the sidewalk nearby, someone had painted in large white letters the words Amerikaner Raus! Americans get out.

One of the city’s ubiquitous white police cars, an Opel with its distinctive green doors, Polizei sign on the side, and blue light perched on the roof, crawled along Hauptstrasse.

The man stepped forward and leaned over the iron railing at the edge of the balcony. He scrutinized the street scene below and pointed. “I think that may be them.”

Two women, both brunettes with shoulder-length hair, had exited from La Belle and were crossing the street, striding away quickly without looking back. It was a giveaway. Both were dressed in tight black skirts and leather jackets. They disappeared around the corner and out of view.

“Yes, it was them,” the KGB woman said. “A couple of minutes now.” She finished her cigarette, stubbed it out on the balcony railing, and tossed the butt out into the gloom, where it floated to the ground. Then she gripped the rail, her knuckles going white as she leaned forward and watched.

The man also finished his cigarette and threw the butt off the balcony.

A group of twentysomethings, laughing and joking, crossed the street below, followed by a couple who were holding hands. Neither the man nor the woman on the balcony spoke as the people below crossed the road, drawing closer to the disco entrance.

A few seconds later, a boom tore through the night air, causing the KGB man to jump involuntarily. Despite the distance, he felt a little of the force of the explosion against his face. The entire ground-floor frontage of the building that housed La Belle disco was blown outward across the street in a storm of glass, steel, concrete, and wood debris.

The group of youngsters vanished behind a cloud of smoke and dust that was propelled outward and upward, hiding much of the building from view, and the sound of people screaming echoed up from the street.

Security and fire alarms triggered by the explosion were ringing, and after a short time, the sound of police sirens could be heard in the distance.

As the dust cloud began to clear, blown by the breeze, the piles of rubble scattered across the street gradually became visible. A man ran over to two girls who were lying spread-eagled on the road amid the debris and knelt next to one of them, placing his hand on her body.

“My God,” the woman said. She instinctively stepped back from the balcony’s edge into the shadows as two police cars screeched to a halt at the point where the spread of rubble began. She turned to face her colleague. “They did it.”

The man pressed his lips together and nodded. He reached out and caressed the nape of the woman’s neck. The entire operation had gone completely according to the plan that he had seen in meetings. The Libyans had done a good job: the carnage inside La Belle must have been enormous. “I need to let the boss know,” he said.

He walked to the rear of the balcony and through the open door into the dimly lit living room of the apartment. He went into the bedroom and sat on the mattress. The sheets were still all awry from their lovemaking earlier.

The man picked up a secure phone that lay on a table. Next to the phone was a West German passport and papers that identified him as an interior design adviser. He dialed a number.

After the usual three rings, a voice answered in Russian. “Da?” Yes?

“FOX is done,” the man replied. “FOX is done.”

“Understood. Thank you. Please keep me informed about the next one.” The line went dead.

Chapter 1

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Washington, DC

Applause rang around room 603 at American University’s College of Law as Joe Johnson wrapped up his lecture on the history of Nazi war crimes prosecutions and the effectiveness over the years of the International Criminal Court in implementing them. He concluded, as he often did, with a few thoughts about the validity of continuing to pursue former SS officers who were now almost all in their nineties.

About 120 students had turned up, which pleased him. Usually his occasional talks for the college’s War Crimes Research Office attracted fewer than that. And judging by the reaction, almost all of those attending seemed to agree with his closing comments that there was complete justification for pursuing justice on behalf of the estimated six million Jews who had died at the hands of the Nazis during the Second World War.

Johnson turned off the PowerPoint slide deck that was being projected from his laptop onto the screen behind him to illustrate his talk. He slowly gathered up his lecture notes from the wooden lectern and shook hands with the director of the WCRO, Sarah Southern, who had been sitting nearby with her deputy, William Cadman.

“Thank you, Joe,” Sarah said, a twinkle in her eye and a half smile creasing her face. “That was incisive as usual. It might just get you another invitation sometime.”

Sarah’s mother, like his mother, Helena, had been a Polish Jewish concentration camp survivor, and they had developed a close bond through their shared family histories. Sarah was passionate about her job, something he greatly respected, and he always appreciated the guest-lecturer invitations she still sent him. The WCRO ran a regular program of guest speakers on a wide variety of topics relating to international criminal law and human rights.

“Sure,” Johnson said. “I’d like to talk about Afghanistan next time. I was there last year. There’s a lot of interesting issues.”

“Afghanistan would be a good idea,” Cadman said. “We haven’t done anything much on it for some time.”

Johnson always smiled every time he bumped into Cadman: the academic was almost a spitting image of Johnson himself. He was of similar age, at fifty-five, of similar height and build, and even had the same semicircle of short-cropped graying hair. The only difference was that Cadman wore a pair of black-rimmed glasses. The two men got on well—like twin brothers, Sarah often joked.

Sarah indicated with her thumb toward the back of the room. “There’s someone over there who came in to see you just before the lecture started. I found him a seat at the back.”

Johnson didn’t need to be told to whom she was referring. He glanced in the direction she was pointing. Most of the students had stood and were filing out of the room, chatting and laughing as they went. In their midst, still sitting in the rear row of seats with his arms folded, looking utterly out of place among a crowd thirty years his junior, was a familiar figure.

He had seen Vic Walter sneak in just before he began his talk. His friend and former CIA colleague had known Johnson was going to be in town for the lecture because they had spoken briefly on the phone the previous week. But he had given no indication that he was going to turn up and listen. Something must be afoot if he had taken time out from his now crazily busy job at the Agency’s Langley headquarters to drive the seven miles to the College of Law.

“I spotted him. I’d better go and have a chat,” Johnson said to Sarah. “Thanks again, and let’s speak soon.”

He picked up his coat, tucked his papers under his arm, and ambled down the aisle between the rows of seats to the rear of the room.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Johnson asked, looking down at Vic, who hadn’t moved.

“You need someone to tidy up those slides for you,” Vic said in his familiar gravelly voice. “They’re high school standard.”

“Thanks. Carrie helped me with them, actually,” Johnson said. His daughter, aged seventeen, was in high school. “I thought she did a good job.”

Vic grinned and looked at Johnson over the top of his metal-rimmed glasses. “Ah, sorry. Don’t tell her I said that.” He stood, tossed his empty plastic takeout coffee cup into a nearby trash can, and shook hands with Johnson.

“You having an easy day today, Vic?”

“Not really. None of my days are easy now. Quite the opposite.”

“But you need to talk?”

Vic waved a hand. “I thought it would be good to catch up for a chat while you’re in town. Don’t see you very often these days. Spur-of-the-moment thing. But let’s not talk in here. Outside?”

Johnson suppressed a grin.

Spur-of-the-moment? Bullshit.

But he nodded, put on his coat, and turned to head out of the room, Vic following behind. They moved down the corridor and out through the glass and metal swinging doors that formed the entrance to the College of Law’s sprawling brick and stone building at 4801 Massachusetts Avenue NW, about a mile and a half east of the Potomac River.

It was an unseasonably warm March afternoon, and daffodils in a bed around the circular fountain in the plaza were waving in a light breeze. A few students, some of whom had removed their coats, were sitting at outdoor tables on the white concrete surface.

Johnson stopped next to a row of bike racks, to which were chained an assortment of bicycles in varying states of repair. He turned to face his former colleague. He and Vic had worked together for the Agency, mainly in Pakistan and Afghanistan, in the 1980s.

“So, how’s the new job going, Vic? You surviving up on that seventh floor, buddy?”

“Not really. I’m still suffering nosebleeds from the height.”

Johnson chuckled. His old friend’s self-deprecating air was one of his most endearing characteristics.

To many people’s surprise at Langley—mostly those who hadn’t worked directly with him—Vic had been appointed the previous September as acting director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, generally known as the Directorate of Operations. Despite being seen by many as something of a fringe candidate, he was then confirmed in the role in December by his boss, Arthur Veltman, the director of Central Intelligence, confounding the promotion ambitions of two associate deputy directors who had both upset the DCI in the preceding months.

Vic’s appointment followed the eventual resignation of the previous director of the NCS, Terry Jenner, in the wake of two successful investigations by Johnson and Vic into one of Jenner’s senior lieutenants and close ally, Robert Watson.

Watson was convicted and imprisoned on an assortment of charges, including corruption and illegal profiteering from arms deals over a long period of time while he was a senior CIA employee. Indeed, Watson had been Johnson and Vic’s boss as chief of the CIA’s Islamabad station in the 1980s and had been largely responsible for having Johnson fired from the service in late 1988.

Given that Johnson was a freelancer, Vic received most of the internal credit for Watson’s demise. But the promotion was more a reward for thirty years of service, much of it spent successfully organizing and running operations in the Near East and Asia, particularly Pakistan and Afghanistan, but also from time to time in Eastern Europe and Russia. Vic had previously had a zigzag career, sometimes taking two steps forward and one back, depending on whose star was in the ascendancy at the Agency. But he had survived and had now adapted to his new more demanding role in his usual understated, laconic manner.

“Get through the first year. Then you’ll be fine,” Johnson said. “Anyway, tell me what’s happening. If you’ve driven here to ask me to do a job, the answer is probably no right now.”

Although it had been several months since the last long overseas investigation Johnson had carried out, in Afghanistan, the effects of being in a couple of life-threatening situations had remained with him. During occasional days off at home in Portland, Maine, he had been recently ruminating once again on whether, as a single dad with two teenagers, he should be carrying out such work at all.

Vic averted his gaze. “Why don’t we go for a coffee?” he suggested. “It’s still chilly out here.”

Johnson sighed. “Did you hear what I said?” He scratched his chin.

“Yes, I did.”

Johnson glanced across the plaza, past the leafless winter trees, at the streams of traffic running two lanes in each direction up and down Massachusetts Avenue past the university buildings.

“Okay, a quick coffee. Then I’m going back to the airport. My kids are expecting me to take them for pizza tonight.”

Vic nodded. “Good.” He beckoned Johnson. “This way. My car’s out the back.”

Chapter 2

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Glen Echo, Maryland

Half an hour later, Johnson and Vic were sitting on a pair of wooden chairs nursing cappuccinos in the bar at the Irish Inn at Glen Echo, a stone’s throw from the east bank of the Potomac River—the Maryland side. A mile or so away, across the other side of the river in Virginia but hidden from view by a thick expanse of trees, lay the CIA’s offices at Langley.

The bar, with its heavy wooden furniture and gourmet menu, was in a low-slung sandstone building with a gray slate roof and a canopied outdoor area. Two flags hung on poles over the entrance—one American, the other Irish.

It had only a smattering of customers, allowing Johnson and Vic to choose a quiet indoor table away from others.

Johnson had been to the Irish Inn several times during his sixteen years in DC as a war crimes investigator with the Office of Special Investigations; it had been given a few makeovers over the years but remained fundamentally unchanged. It had always been one of Vic’s regular haunts when he needed a quiet chat with somebody without any danger of surveillance.

By this time, Johnson was braced for the sales pitch that he knew was coming.

But, as usual, Vic first asked about how Johnson’s kids, Carrie and Peter, were doing and then gave an update on his own two children, a boy and a girl, who were now in their twenties. Vic lived not too far away, in the DC neighborhood of Palisades.

After ten minutes of chitchat, Johnson glanced at his watch, then leaned forward and propped his elbows on the table. “All right, Vic,” he said, “let’s cut the crap. I’ve only got forty minutes before I need to leave for the airport. What is it?”

Vic rubbed his graying temples. “Listen. Normally I wouldn’t bother you with this, but since I was promoted I’ve had more freedom to draw on certain external resources that I might not have had before.”

“Like I said, I’m not doing CIA work for you.”

“No. War crimes only, I know that,” Vic said. “But there’s an element of that in an operation we’re looking at. You could add some value to it. I think you’d be interested.”

“Add some value to it?” Johnson muttered. “Is it compulsory to use corporate speak now that you’re in the top job?”

“We’ve got someone incoming in a couple of weeks,” Vic said, ignoring Johnson’s jibe. “From the other side.”

A defector, then. Interesting. “Who? From China? They’re the big threat now, aren’t they?” Johnson asked. “Or Moscow?”

“Right second time. The Chinese are after our technology and industrial intelligence, true, they want to overtake us. But the Russians matter more politically—they’d still like to destroy us. The guy is SVR. It’s a joint operation with the Brits.”

The SVR was Russia’s foreign intelligence service. It operated in tandem with the Federal Security Service—the FSB—its domestic equivalent. Until 1991 both units were part of the KGB, which after the dissolution of the Soviet Union was split into two separate organizations.

“Why is he important?” Johnson asked. “What’s the background?”

Vic hesitated. Clearly, he was about to venture into classified territory, Johnson assumed. It hadn’t stopped him before—his friend had trusted him implicitly ever since he had saved Vic’s life in a shoot-out while the two of them were on a CIA cross-border operation from their Pakistan base into Afghanistan in 1988.

“It’s a bit sensitive,” Vic said.

“It always is.” Johnson fingered the small nick at the top of his right ear, a legacy of that shoot-out in Jalalabad, when he was clipped by a bullet from a KGB sniper while he and Vic were trying to escape back to Pakistan.

“It’s someone who’s got a lot of massively useful information. An SVR colonel. Some of it’s about current issues, but some is historic too, which is where you come in.”

“Why are you bringing him in? If this guy has good access in Moscow, why not leave him in place?”

“He’s been in place for a long time, actually,” Vic said, lowering his voice even further. “Been very useful to us and to MI6. They’ve been handling him with plenty of input from us. He notified his handler, Six’s head of station in Berlin, that he wanted to come across. We’re going to be heavily involved in the operation and the debrief.”

Johnson drummed his fingers lightly on the table. “Is he blown?”

“No. But he would be if he gives us what he’s got and stays. They would know exactly where the information came from. It would be a one-way ticket to Butyrka or Lefortovo.”

The basement “interview” rooms of Russia’s two most notorious prisons remained the usual destination for those who were caught betraying the Motherland, despite all the modernization that had taken place in some other respects across the country. The thugs in the SVR’s counterintelligence department, known as Line KR, would ensure that anyone caught spying for the enemy would pay a full price—quite probably the ultimate price.

“So, he’s got no choice?” Johnson asked.

“Correct.”

“Must be big, then?”

“It is. Or so he tells us. I mean, he’s given us only an outline. We’ll get the full juice when he’s safely over the line.” Vic leaned back in his chair and sipped his coffee. “Believe me, I’d prefer to leave him where he is. He’s been good.”

“So what has he hinted at that’s prompted you to come here and talk to me?”

Vic drained his coffee and leaned forward again, his face just a couple of feet from Johnson’s. “The current stuff supposedly involves the identity of a mole—a highly placed one—in Western intelligence.”

“From which service?” Johnson asked.

“It’s either MI6 or—God forbid—the Agency,” he murmured. “If it proves to be the Agency, and it’s someone in my directorate, I could become the shortest-serving head of the DO in living memory. We’ve had serious leaks to Moscow, including in the past few weeks alone a lot of naval intelligence relating to US and NATO’s planned response to Russia’s annexation of the Crimea. There have been other leaks, all involving joint operations with the Brits, which makes it harder to trace the source.”

“And the defector somehow knows who this mole is?” Johnson asked.

“Yes. So he says.” Vic sat back and folded his arms.

“And the historic material?” Johnson asked.

“It goes back to the ’80s. Cold War dirty tricks in Berlin.”

 Johnson raised his eyebrows. “Stasi or KGB?”

The Stasi was the East German State Security Service during the postwar years when the country was split, responsible for both internal and foreign intelligence and security. It had a massive number of informants across the country, including a network of ordinary citizens who spied on their neighbors and even their own families.

“Apparently both services,” Vic said.

“Is that going to be of interest now?”

Vic pursed his lips. “I don’t know. It’s a long time ago. But . . .” He let his voice trail away.

“But what?”

“It’s difficult.” Vic hesitated and wiped away a small blob of cappuccino froth from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. “It’s personal, actually.”

“Come on, Vic.”

“All right. Do you recall the La Belle disco bombing? Berlin nightclub in the Friedenau area. About 229 people maimed for life or injured, mostly Germans, but many were Americans. Three people died.”

Johnson did recall it, at least the broad details. He had spent four years studying for a PhD at Berlin’s Freie Universität from 1980-84, but had left the city and was working for the CIA when in April 1986 a bomb planted by Libyan terrorists blew apart the La Belle disco. The media coverage in the States had been massive given that the club was a favorite of US soldiers serving in the divided city.

It had been one of the most symbolic terrorist attacks of the Cold War era in Europe and had come at a time when Johnson enjoyed visiting discos. He recalled thinking how it would feel if a bomb had gone off at a similar club in Portland.

“Yes, I remember it. Of course I do. But what’s the connection that you think might be of interest to me? And why is it personal?”

“Like I said, I’ve hardly any details yet, but the word is that our man has some information of not just who was behind the bombing but some other deeper stuff, apparently.”

“Intriguing. Going higher up the chain of command, you mean? Something criminal that could lead to prosecutions?”

Vic inclined his head. “Can’t say exactly. But the guy was working for the KGB in East Berlin at that time and knew the key players both on the Soviet side and on the Stasi side, given that the Stasi were effectively just KGB lackeys.”

“But I thought some Libyans were convicted? Gaddafi’s crew.” Johnson remembered reading reports of the trial that had taken place years later. The Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, was seen as having ordered the attack for which five people were eventually imprisoned in 2001. As part of an anti-American, anti-Western capitalist agenda, Gaddafi also ordered the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, a jumbo jet that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, killing 270 people. Two decades later, Libya paid compensation to victims for these and other atrocities.

“Yes, they were. But it seems there was more to it than that.” Vic stroked his chin. “Exactly what, we will find out, no doubt. But I thought it might conceivably be something you would find interesting. My team and the Brits, the MI6 lot, will be entirely focused on the current issue I’ve described—the mole—whereas this other historical material, the Cold War criminal element, might be right up your alley. I would really like you to have a go at it.”

Johnson screwed up his eyes. “I don’t think so, Vic. I’m sure there must be someone in your team who could handle this alongside whatever other material the guy is going to give you. It’s not a war crime, is it?”

“I would say it definitely is. A Cold War crime.”

A group of middle-aged men in suits, laughing and joking among themselves, walked into the bar and began a raucous discussion about which of the beers available on tap they should opt for. They had probably finished work early and stopped in for refreshments en route home.

Johnson turned his attention back to Vic. “Look, where is this guy going to be debriefed?”

“Berlin, strangely enough. He’ll be coming in on a train from Prague, where he’s meant to be visiting one of his agents.”

Johnson shook his head. Berlin: his old stomping ground during the early 1980s when he spent four years at the Freie Universität studying for a PhD. He’d loved the place and the sinister, mysterious atmosphere that encompassed it at the height of the Cold War.

“You want me to travel to Berlin for this when you’ve got any number of guys at the CIA station there on the doorstep who could handle it?” Johnson asked.

Vic nodded.

“But why?”

Vic looked down at the floor and then back up at Johnson. “Like I said, it’s personal.”

“How?”

“There were seventy-nine American soldiers injured in La Belle, and two of the three who died were American. One of the injured lost his right eye and eighty percent of the vision in his left eye, as well as his hearing. A few years later he committed suicide because of severe depression brought on by the long-term effects of the post-traumatic stress disorder he suffered from because of his injuries.”

“Go on,” Johnson said. He was intrigued now, not least because Vic was visibly struggling to get his words out. “Who was that?”

Vic turned his head and gazed out the window. “My brother.”

***

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Portland, Maine

“What’s your definition of a traitor then, Dad?” Carrie asked.

Johnson glanced at his daughter, who had a slight grin on her face. She was always asking provocative questions. Now in eleventh grade at high school, it was no wonder she was aiming to be a journalist after college.

“It depends on your point of view,” Johnson said. “If you are sitting in Moscow and your man deserts to the US, you would call him a traitor. We might call him a defector. And vice versa if he was an American who left to sell his secrets to Russia. Thankfully we don’t have too many of those.”

“There are always some, though,” Carrie said.

“Yes, unfortunately there are some.”

“I’m honestly surprised you haven’t been tempted to be a traitor, Dad. We could have had a bigger house, couldn’t we? Think of all those rubles. Easy money.”

“Are you trying to put your old dad in jail?” Johnson pretended to chase after his daughter, waving his fist. She ran off, laughing, her long dark brown hair trailing in the breeze behind her.

Johnson, Carrie, and his son, Peter, who was in tenth grade, were walking the family dog, Cocoa, along the three-and-a-half-mile trail that ran around Back Cove, an inlet off Casco Bay on the Atlantic coast. It lay at the end of Parsons Road, where they lived in a two-story cape house with green shutters on all the windows.

Johnson had just broken the news to his two children that he was about to head off overseas on another work trip, this time to Europe. He found himself in that position every so often, and it never got any easier.

“So will you be hunting traitors again on this job?” Carrie asked. She knew that was often his role, although he never gave his children any specifics.

“I can’t say exactly,” Johnson said. He was unable to give them any details of the operation he was about to embark on, other than to tell them it was important. He couldn’t say where, who, why, or how—which were the usual questions from his daughter, not necessarily in that order.

“Will you be back in time for spring break?” Carrie asked.

The high school she and her brother both attended, not far from their house, had its one-week spring break scheduled for mid-April. Carrie was already planning for it.

“Of course. This shouldn’t be a long job,” Johnson said, although in truth he wasn’t quite sure how long it might take.

“At least you won’t be missing any of my basketball games,” Peter said, running a hand through his short dark hair.

“No, it’s good timing from that point of view,” Johnson said. Peter, now almost six feet tall and very close to his father’s height, had continued to make excellent progress through yet another basketball season during which he had excelled as point guard on his school team. He was without doubt the best passer in the squad, with an average of 8.2 assists per game.

“I hope this job will be safer than that Afghanistan investigation you did last year,” Peter said.

“It will be. That was an exception,” Johnson said. He had given them only a brief taste of the dangers he had faced in Afghanistan. It was important to let them know what he did for a living so that they didn’t think the money appeared from nowhere, but he did try not to worry them more than he had to.

Cocoa suddenly lurched at a man riding a bike along the path toward them and started barking. “No, Cocoa!” Johnson shouted. He pulled the lead sharply to get him back.

“And you’ll get some of Aunty Amy’s great cooking for a week or two while I’m away—she’s miles better than me,” Johnson said.

“No, she’s not,” Carrie said. “I love your roast chicken dish.”

Ever since the death of Johnson’s wife Kathy in 2005 after a battle with cancer, his sister, Amy Wilde, would move temporarily into his house to look after the kids while he was away on work trips. She and her husband, Don, didn’t have their own children, and she relished the opportunity to play mother for a short while. These days, however, given the kids’ ages, little supervision was required; Carrie often even did a share of the cooking.

“So, will you be hunting Nazis this time, Dad?” Peter asked.

“No, not this time. No Nazis involved,” Johnson said.

“Russians?” Peter asked.

Johnson laughed. “I can’t say. I’m not allowed. Nice try, though—you could go through the list of possibilities and work it out if I let you.”

“It’s called detective work,” Peter said, a grin on his face. He had occasionally hinted that he might like to be a police investigator one day.

“Yes, well, maybe I should take you with me after all. I might be doing some of that type of work.”

“It’s what you’re good at, Dad.”

Johnson nodded his head and watched the sun glinting off the small waves that rippled across Back Cove. Yes, his son was right. It was what he was good at and what he enjoyed doing. He felt fortunate that he could earn a living that way.

Chapter 3

Friday, March 21, 2014

Berlin

Johnson peered out of the blackened one-way windows of the fake Deutsche Telekom–branded Mercedes surveillance van down Friedrichstrasse toward the railway station at the far end of the street.

Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, proclaimed a sign attached to the railway bridge with a glass-sided canopy that formed part of the station and spanned the street ahead of him. A train pulled out of the station, gathering speed as it crossed the rail bridge, high above the heads of the melee of commuters, shoppers, and tourists who were touring the city’s key landmarks: the Reichstag, Brandenburg Gate, and Checkpoint Charlie.

A young arty-looking woman with a Canon camera stood on an island in the center of the street that formed a tram and bus stop, busy taking shots of a tram approaching from the north. A group of well-dressed girls brandishing shopping bags rounded the corner past an Opel car showroom and almost collided with a middle-aged man in a tracksuit who was jogging in the opposite direction.

It was the kind of typical Friday afternoon scene to be found in any city center across Europe.

Inside the heavily disguised telecoms engineering van, Johnson sat next to Vic, who was carefully watching a bank of five video monitor screens mounted above a desk that ran along one side of the interior wall. His secure smartphone beeped, and he picked it up to scrutinize the incoming message.

“BLACKBIRD’s on the train out of Prague,” Vic said. “No sign of any surveillance, he’s reporting. Our boys are watching him, and they’re confirming he’s black.”

BLACKBIRD was the code name by which Vic’s team now referred to the defector. Vic had disclosed to Johnson that his actual name was Gennady Yezhov, a KGB and SVR operative from St. Petersburg who had worked in a variety of roles across different functions during a twenty-eight-year career.

“Has he got family?” Johnson asked.

“He probably doesn’t see much of them, but yes. Wife, Varvara, two children, daughter and son, aged twenty-five and twenty-two. Katya and Timur,” Vic said. “They’ll be left behind in St. Petersburg, but they’ll join him as soon as they can. Moscow might make their life miserable in the meantime, which worries me considerably.”

Vic had set up a secure text connection so that he could communicate directly with BLACKBIRD if needed, although such messages would be kept to an absolute minimum and would be brief.

Vic turned to a laptop keyboard, typed in a short message, and pressed send. “Just letting Mark, Langley, and Bernice know he’s safely on the train.”

Bernice Franklin was the CIA station chief in London, who was a key liaison person for Vauxhall Cross—the London headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service, the UK’s counterpart to the CIA and better known as MI6.

The small MI6 team involved in the operation, which had been kept tight, was led by Mark Nicklin-Donovan, whom Johnson knew because Mark had been the former boss of his British partner in several war crimes investigations over the previous few years: Jayne Robinson.

Nicklin-Donovan had since had a couple of promotions from his previous role as chief of the UK controllerate to his current job as director of operations, effectively deputy chief of the entire MI6 organization.

Also heavily involved was the MI6 head of Berlin station, Rick Jones, a platinum-haired man in his fifties, who had been handling BLACKBIRD and was responsible for liaison with the German team at the BND, Germany’s federal intelligence agency. He was now sitting at the rear of the van, perched uncomfortably on a folding stool, peering at his laptop.

BLACKBIRD had completed his scheduled meeting with his agent in Prague over lunch, according to secure text messages he had dispatched during the afternoon. He had then retired to his hotel room for a rest and to change his appearance before beginning a two-hour surveillance detection route around Prague’s old town area prior to boarding the train, leaving his suitcase and most of his belongings in his hotel room.

He was now carrying a false passport, had dyed his graying hair black, and was wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses.

The journey to Berlin was scheduled to take around four and a half hours. Johnson glanced at his watch. BLACKBIRD was now about halfway through the trip, assuming there were no delays, and would be arriving at around quarter past six, just after sunset.

BLACKBIRD’s train would arrive at Berlin’s futuristic new central railway station, the glass and steel Hauptbahnhof. The defector would then take the S-Bahn local train to Friedrichstrasse station, just under a mile away to the southwest and situated right at the point where the rail line and the street named Friedrichstrasse crossed the River Spree.

He would emerge from the S-Bahn station onto Friedrichstrasse and be picked up by a CIA car disguised as one of Berlin’s taxis before being whisked to a safe house near the Botanic Garden where the debriefings would take place. This was deemed a more secure and anonymous location than the CIA station within the huge US embassy building at Pariser Platz, next to the Brandenburg Gate.

BLACKBIRD would then be taken to London, where Nicklin-Donovan and his MI6 team would continue the debriefing process, helped by the CIA station, and would find him a berth under a new identity somewhere well out of the limelight.

Vic folded his arms, stared at the van ceiling for a few seconds, and let out a long sigh. He was looking nervous, as well he might do. The risk of a Russian counterintelligence team tracking BLACKBIRD appeared to have been minimized, thanks to all the precautions that had been taken. But there was a huge amount at stake.

“Don’t worry, Vic. It’ll be fine,” Johnson said.

“It had better be fine,” Vic said.

Since their initial conversation in the Irish Inn a couple of weeks earlier, Vic had hinted at some of the damage done by the leaks that had come out of a number of CIA and MI6 joint operations over recent months. Three highly placed Western moles within the SVR—two of them handled by the CIA, one by MI6—had vanished off the radar. Both intelligence agencies were now working under the assumption that many of their operations across Eastern Europe and the Middle East were blown.

 After Vic’s personal disclosure about his brother Nicholas, Johnson had found it difficult to follow his initial instinct to decline the invitation to get involved in the debriefing process with BLACKBIRD. If it was personal to Vic, then given their close friendship over the years, he felt some obligation to help.

Vic had confided that he couldn’t face getting tangled up in a historic investigation that involved his brother but wanted someone he could trust on the case.

The revelation had come as a surprise to Johnson. He vaguely knew about the suicide, of course, and that Nicholas had been injured while on military service in West Germany. But Vic had always appeared unwilling to discuss his brother’s death, and Johnson had never liked to press him. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time the two of them had mentioned Nicholas in conversation.

Johnson’s resolve to assist had only hardened after a visit the previous afternoon to the site of the La Belle bombing twenty-eight years earlier, the Roxy Palast building at 78-79 Hauptstrasse, about four miles to the southwest of the vehicle in which he was now sitting. Various shops and an organic food market were now occupying the ground floor, making it difficult to imagine the horrors of that night.

Johnson had stood for some time staring at a gray metal plaque that was mounted on the exterior wall of the Roxy Palast building.

“In this building on 5 April 1986 young people were murdered by a criminal bomb attack,” it read in German.

Johnson looked around the van. He certainly wasn’t the only friend whom Vic had asked for help. On one wall, a monitor screen showed the figure of a man hunched over his laptop, tapping away. This was one of Johnson and Vic’s long-term CIA colleagues dating back to their Islamabad days, Neal Scales, who was also in Berlin but working at the Botanic Garden safe house and joining the action by secure video link. As soon as Vic’s appointment as head of the Directorate of Operations had been confirmed, almost his first act had been to promote Neal, who was now number three in the department.

The move to promote Neal had upset a few senior members of the Directorate of Operations. They included a small number of station chiefs in major capitals who had spent years jockeying for position to take the number three slot. However, the vast majority of those at Langley held Neal in high esteem, and overall, the promotion was a popular one that had helped cement Vic’s power base.

It was highly unusual for so many of the senior leadership team to become actively involved in an operation such as this, but it was in character for Vic, who had always been hands-on. He liked to lead from the front. Quite apart from the personal elements involved, it also reflected the importance to him of ensuring the first major operation of his tenure went well.

Another member of the CIA’s Berlin-based operations team, Mary Gassey, was sitting opposite Johnson, in front of five other monitor screens. On one of her screens were twelve thumbnail video images from which she could choose for display at full size on any of the four other monitors.

The CIA’s technical team, working with Jones’s team at the MI6 Berlin station and Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, the BND, had arranged to draw on the outputs from a series of CCTV security cameras along the route that BLACKBIRD would take upon arrival in Berlin. Most of the cameras belonged to the S-Bahn rail network. Vic and his team in the surveillance van had access to all the video feeds via their monitor screens.

Johnson felt his phone vibrate twice in his pocket as a couple of messages arrived. He fished it out and checked the screen. The first message was from Carrie, asking if he was okay and reassuring him that everything was under control at home.

The second message was from Jayne Robinson, encrypted as was usually the case with messages between them. Jayne had been first on Johnson’s list of people to call as soon as he committed himself to the Berlin trip. If there was going to be an investigation, then he would want her to be involved. However, that depended on the information to be obtained from BLACKBIRD, which was still an unknown quantity. Johnson had therefore decided to put Jayne on standby rather than bring her to Berlin for the debriefing.

Any update? Jayne’s message read.

Johnson took a breath. He had been thinking about Jayne quite often in recent months. He had known her since 1988, when they had worked together in Pakistan and Afghanistan, helping the Afghan mujahideen in their battles against occupying Russian forces. She was with MI6, he with the CIA. For a short while, they had also been lovers.

They got back together in 2011, albeit only in the work sense, when Jayne, still working for MI6, helped Johnson in his hunt for an old Nazi concentration camp commander. She then left MI6 in 2012 after a twenty-six-year career to go permanently freelance, initially working with Johnson on a war crimes investigation focused on Bosnia and Croatia.

Johnson was halfway through tapping out a quick reply when a sharp sound from the other side of the van interrupted him. Mary slammed her hand down on the narrow desk in front of the monitors and swore.

“Shit, shit. These damned feeds are useless.”

Johnson looked up to see that two of the four screens had gone black, apart from a series of flickering horizontal white lines moving up and down the screen.

“Which ones are down?” Vic asked, stepping across to take a closer look.

“We’ve lost the one on the platform at the Hauptbahnhof and also the one outside the Friedrichstrasse station entrance, where BLACKBIRD’s going to be picked up,” Mary said.

She turned to Jones, who had also stood and was looking at the screens.

“Rick, can you get those frigging tech guys to figure this out? Otherwise we’re going to be working in the dark when BLACKBIRD turns up.”

As she spoke, the third monitor went black, then the fourth.

“Yes, I’ll get them on it right now,” Jones said, running a hand through his hair. “How annoying.”

Mary threw her head back. “Annoying? It’s more than annoying. This is a joke. BLACKBIRD’s due here in a couple of hours, and we’ve got no video feeds.”

***

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Published by Andrew Turpin