But then he saw a figure emerge from the rear entrance at around quarter to eleven. He grabbed his military binoculars and focused. It was Johnson, clearly recognizable from his photograph, carrying a black backpack and a small suitcase.
Alejandro watched as Johnson, who was wearing a black jacket, jeans, and black leather lace-up shoes, checked around the parking lot.
Then he returned to the BMW, got down on his hands and knees, looked underneath the car, and checked the wheel wells. Alejandro smiled to himself. Johnson finally put his bags in the car, climbed in, and drove out through the barrier.
Alejandro climbed swiftly into the front seat, started his engine, and followed some distance behind. He was only just in time to see Johnson leave the main road and then pull into the twenty-four-hour Minories public parking garage on the corner of Shorter and Mansell Streets.
Alejandro followed into the parking garage and slid his car into a space on Level Two, one level higher than where Johnson had parked his BMW. Then he walked silently to the concrete pedestrian stairwell and waited until he heard Johnson’s footsteps below.
Once the footsteps had faded, Alejandro followed down the stairwell. He eventually emerged from the building at ground level and moved straight into a dark alcove. He searched first right, then left.
The only person in view was a man walking away from the parking garage up the road, wearing a pale-yellow baseball cap, a white hoodie, and jeans, with a small backpack on his back.
Cursing, Alejandro scanned the area. There was nobody else in view. He looked again at the man in the baseball cap, then realized. The clothes might have changed, but the black leather shoes and the backpack hadn’t.
Okay, Johnson’s a pro, but maybe not quite pro enough, Alejandro thought. He had seen all this before. His stint in the Argentine army’s intelligence service had left him well practiced.
Johnson went up the road toward Portsoken Street. Alejandro, clinging closely to the shadows of an overhanging building, followed some distance behind. Johnson then proceeded to take a left turn, followed by another. Then he paused, took his phone out and appeared to make a short call.
Alejandro remained motionless in an alcove of an office building. Johnson finished the call and took yet another left, seemingly heading back in the direction of the parking garage where he had started.
But when Alejandro turned the corner back to the parking garage, Johnson had vanished. Cursing, Alejandro walked almost at jogging pace along the road, checking a couple of narrow alleys to both the right and the left as he went. But there was no sign of the American.
After another ten minutes of scouring the area, Alejandro kicked the ground and decided to give up.
At least he knew where Johnson’s car was. He returned to the parking garage and took a few photographs of the black BMW on his phone, then he dialed a number.
“Hola, Alejandro here. I’ve got his car, took a few photographs. He’s moved from the hotel, but the bastard gave me the slip. He may have spotted me tailing him, not sure. I’m heading back now.”
“You need to take a refresher course, I think,” Diego said. “Get your ass back here then, quick as you can.”
Alejandro shook his head, got in his car, and drove off.
They sat at Jayne’s small circular wooden dining table and pored over the handwritten note together. After the empty hotel room, a day largely by himself, and then the note, the company felt good to Johnson.
“It looks childish at first glance, but it’s got a slightly official manner to it,” Jayne said. “The word operation, and the way it mentions implication and consequence. I may be wrong, but that’s my initial impression. It’s the sort of terminology someone like a police officer or a soldier would use.”
“Maybe,” Johnson said. “I also think it’s written by a foreigner, rather than someone who’s just badly educated. Someone badly educated probably wouldn’t use that kind of vocabulary in any language.”
“You look as though you need a whiskey,” Jayne said.
“Yes, I do,” Johnson said. “Apart from the note, someone tailed me when I left the parking garage to walk here a short while ago. I spotted him and shook him off by cutting down an alley. But it’s worrisome.”
Jayne pursed her lips. “Good to know you’ve not forgotten your streetcraft,” she said as she got up to fetch the whiskey.
Johnson observed Jayne’s flat; it was smaller than he expected. A clean, modern apartment within a block that was maybe ten years old, definitely no more than fifteen.
The spare room had a double bed with a sunny yellow bedspread but no other furniture apart from the fitted wardrobe and a bedside table.
A small balcony off the living room looked out toward Tower Bridge, and there was a galley-style kitchen and a small dining area. A black leather sofa and two matching armchairs stood in the living room.
It was really a flat for one person, with room for occasional visitors. A minimalistic, low-maintenance property. At London house prices, she could probably sell it and swap it for his large house in Portland and still have change left over, Johnson calculated.
The bookcase was crammed with the legacy of Jayne’s various overseas postings: travel books, political biographies, military histories, and novels from all over the world, a few of them written in foreign languages. Johnson knew that, like him, Jayne was a natural linguist, fluent in French, Spanish and Russian, and spoke excellent German and Serbo-Croat.
Jayne returned with a glass of single malt and put the bottle down on the table next to Johnson.
“Have you had this flat swept recently?” Johnson said. It had crossed his mind that Jayne’s paymasters might well be checking her place. He didn’t want his discussions fed back to Vauxhall Cross, Langley, Tel Aviv, or anywhere, for that matter.
“Had someone in privately to do it twice in the past year. Found nothing,” Jayne said. “So, what about this Mossad connection?”
She was clearly unconcerned.
“I don’t know,” Johnson said. “It doesn’t add up—”
Jayne interrupted. “No, it doesn’t add up. My thoughts exactly. I know a bit about the Mossad, and given their track record, they would have taken this Guzmann guy out years ago, decades ago, if he’d done anything Israel didn’t like, for sure. Or alternatively, if he wasn’t of any use to them anymore. End of story.”
Johnson took out his phone and checked his e-mails. There was, at last, a reply from his former OSI colleague Ben at the HRSP. He opened it swiftly.
Nothing positive for you, Joe, unfortunately. There’s no record at all of a José Guzmann in the SS files—no hits. Sorry. Van Stalheim’s file is there, but we never traced him, and he vanished after that inquiry you worked on back in ’96. He’s probably dead. Keep in touch. Happy to help on these things occasionally. Ben.
Johnson closed the e-mail, then collapsed back in the chair and sighed. He could see this one was going to require some persistence.
Chapter Nineteen
Thursday, November 24, 2011
London
“Better look out around here. Keep your wallet hidden and your phone in your pocket. You want to be careful, mate. I grew up in Peckham. Hated it,” the taxi driver told Ignacio.
Ignacio would have laughed had he not been so tired after his thirty-hour journey via Houston and Chicago. Just as well the driver didn’t live in the crime-ridden hellhole that was Barrio 31, where he had to pay his neighbors protection money to look after his house while he was away on business, he thought.
He paid the driver for the journey from Heathrow Airport and walked up a short gravel driveway to the door of the house, which had probably been a pub in a former lifetime, judging by its design and the fittings outside.
Ignacio was about to knock when he heard a bellowing scream from inside that was instantly muffled. A man’s scream of pain.
Momentarily, the prospect of sitting down with his group of hot-headed, cannabis-fueled ex-army friends and work
ing out a viable plan to solve his family business’s problems was not an appealing one.
We’ve had him holed up in the house here for the past three days, trying to pump him for information.
He exhaled hard, then knocked.
A minute later, the front door opened a fraction and a scarred face framed by greasy dark hair peered out. “Hola, Ignacio . . . at last. Come in. We’re busy here,” Diego said in Spanish. He led the way through a wood-floored living area, with high ceilings and walls stripped back to the brickwork.
“What is this place? It looks like an old bar,” Ignacio asked.
“Yeah, used to be a pub called the White Ram, the rental guy said. Good, isn’t it?”
Diego continued into a kitchen with a long wooden table in the center.
On the table Ignacio saw a fat gray-haired man strapped down with black bindings that ran underneath the table, holding him tightly in place, pressing down on his fleshy chest and belly. He was naked apart from a pair of dark blue boxer shorts. In his mouth was a bright red plastic ball that was fixed in place with gaffer tape.
His left foot stuck out at a right angle. Neither his big toe nor the one next to it had nails, just a mess of ragged red flesh where they had been. The wounds dripped blood slowly onto the floor. Next to his foot on the table was a pair of pliers covered in blood.
At the bottom of the table, wielding another pair of pliers, stood a grim-looking Alejandro. The two missing nails were lying on a piece of newspaper on the floor, tiny pieces of red flesh still attached.
The man on the table had his eyes closed, but he was still breathing.
“He’s finally started talking a little,” Diego said.
Alejandro bent down and put a bowl on the floor to catch the dripping blood.
Ignacio stood, both hands on hips, taking in the scene quietly. Then he fixed his gaze on Diego. He distinctly remembered giving instructions to keep the man blindfolded. Now he had seen all of them.
Ignacio sighed heavily and clenched his fists. “Okay. What’s his name? And what have you got him to say?”
“Keith Bartelski’s his name,” Diego said. “First the gold. It’s coming from Poland. He’s told us that much. The old man who runs the gold business, Jacob Kudrow, although he calls himself another name, Jack Kew, fetches it. He works with another old man who runs the car-parts business next door, Leopold Skorupski.”
“Yes, but Poland’s huge,” Ignacio said. “Where exactly? That’s what I want to know.”
“He won’t tell us exactly where, says he doesn’t know. I think that’s bullshit. He also said something about a map in a filing cabinet in the office. Another thing, he also said the old man’s grandson knows where the gold is. But he wouldn’t tell me how they transport it here or how they get it to Argentina.”
“A grandson? Who’s that?” Ignacio asked.
“His name’s Oliver Kew, and he’s at Bristol University. That’s all he said.”
“Interesting. Has he said why they are doing it? And how they’ve managed to keep forcing my father to buy at such a price?”
“No, nothing. But there’s another eight toes to go. And ten fingers and thumbs.”
Keith jerked his head upward and groaned. His eyes flicked open and he stared at Ignacio and Diego. He made a loud moaning noise behind the ball gag, and then the back of his head crashed back onto the table with a loud thud.
Ignacio walked to the window. Raindrops streamed across the glass. Outside, the road was a gray metal river, the silhouettes of cars and trucks duplicated by their reflections beneath them. The only color came from passing red London buses. A morass of black clouds sped from north to south, losing its definition as the rain descended.
He faced Keith. “Hmm, two nails. It is possible, isn’t it, there’s just a faint possibility, that he doesn’t actually frigging know.”
Diego shrugged. “It’s possible.”
Ignacio hesitated. “All right, keep at him for a while. See if we can get any more. But blindfold him and keep him that way. Just don’t kill the idiot. Not yet. We also need to sort out this Johnson guy. What have you found out about him? Where’s he staying? Has he got a car?”
“Yes, he’s got a black BMW. He’s got it parked in a public parking garage up near Tower Bridge. We tried to follow him, but he gave us the slip, so we’re not sure where he’s staying. We’re trying to spend as much time as we can watching, but we can’t do everything.”
Ignacio folded his arms. “All right. What about his car?”
Diego stared at his old army colleague. The flicker of a grin crossed his face. “You mean . . . ?”
Ignacio nodded.
Chapter Twenty
Thursday, November 24, 2011
London
“I’m trying to find a synagogue with a strong Polish community,” Johnson said to the administrator at the Central London Synagogue. “I’ve got an elderly aunt who’s recently moved to London and she needs a place to go where she feels at home.”
The man tugged at his beard and peered at Johnson over the top of his rimless glasses. “There’s still a few, though a lot of the Polish Jews have moved out now,” he said. “There were a lot in the East End, but nearly all of the synagogues have long since closed.”
However, he listed a few names, which Johnson wrote down.
It wasn’t until he had been to a couple that he realized it was Thanksgiving Day. What better way to spend it than trailing around synagogues in London on a seemingly fruitless search for Jacob Kudrow. So far, nobody had heard of him.
The next one on Johnson’s list was the Bevis Marks synagogue, next to the odd-looking office building called the Gherkin at St Mary Axe. It might be traditionally more Iberian Jewish than Polish, the Central London Synagogue administrator had said, but it was definitely worth a try.
Bevis Marks, a brick building bearing a plaque that dated it to 1701, was dwarfed by ugly concrete and glass office blocks that surrounded it on all sides.
The old and the new. It reminded Johnson why he loved London.
Inside, two middle-aged ladies in the administrative office exchanged blank looks after he launched into his inquiry about Jacob Kudrow.
Well, alternatively, did they know anyone in the jewelry trade who worshipped there? More blank looks. Well, there was one old East Ender called Al who knew everyone and was often around, but he wasn’t now. Maybe he should try Hackney and East London synagogue, one of the ladies advised. There were a lot of skilled craftsmen in that area.
Johnson walked out and tipped his head up. It was starting to get dark. Realistically, he could see the chances of tracking down Jacob Kudrow by traipsing on foot from one synagogue to another were hovering somewhere between zero and outer space, as Vic used to put it.
He sat down on one end of a long wooden bench in the courtyard just outside the synagogue.
The words needle and haystack danced around inside his mind, turning themselves into images that grew increasingly vivid and animated the more he ruminated on them, like some kind of Disney cartoon film.
The needle and the haystack.
Johnson shook his head. Then he remembered the pack of Marlboros in his bag, lit one, and took a deep drag. The sensation of light-headedness felt good.
An old man wearing a cloth cap and a faded three-piece suit wandered in through the gate and sat at the other end of the bench.
Johnson finished his cigarette and stubbed out the butt on the ground. Then he took out of his pocket the bar of chocolate he had bought at Kew Gardens. As he peeled back the wrapping, the man watched him intently.
“You go to this shul? I saw you come out.” He spoke in a cracked, croaky voice.
Johnson glanced at the man. “I’m sorry?”
“This synagogue—do you go here?”
“Nope, just visiting.”
The old man grunted. “You American?”
“Yes, from Portland, in Maine. On the East Coast.” Johnson held out his hand. “I’m
Joe Johnson.” The old man grasped it with a cold hand, which Johnson noticed was mottled with dark veins and purple blotches.
“Al Nicholson. Nice to meet you. I’ve been here forty years. Used to be a great shul, this one. Ain’t many people left now, compared with back then. The youngsters, they don’t want to know anymore.”
Johnson offered him a piece of chocolate. He took it.
“Thanks. So what brings you here?” he rasped.
“I was trying to find someone, but I’m not having any luck.”
Al grunted. A minute later he said, “Who is it, the person you’re looking for?”
“An elderly man, probably older than you: a jeweler by the name of Jacob Kudrow who runs a gold business. He’s a Jew, from Poland originally.”
“No, never heard of anyone of that name. I know a few jewelers, though. I worked for one, a long time back, for a few years before I retired, not far from here. They’re still there.”
He started coughing, a hacking, wheezing cough that, once started, he struggled to stop.
Eventually it subsided, and Al blew his nose loudly. They sat in silence for a few minutes, eating the chocolate.
Johnson said, “So who was the man you worked for? Maybe he would know my guy.”
Al started coughing again, apologizing between each croaking bark. “This is going back to the late ’80s. The boss there was a guy called Jack Kew.”
Johnson sat thinking. “So you don’t know if he’s still alive? He wasn’t from Poland, by any chance?”
“Not sure, but he wasn’t English. Definitely not. You could hear his accent. It was a funny business, old-fashioned. It had been there for years. It’s still there. There’s another business next to it, a car-parts company. Jack was matey with the owner, a guy called Leopold. Can’t remember the surname.”
The Last Nazi (A Joe Johnson Thriller, Book 1) Page 13