Another hour and a half, Johnson estimated.
Fiona shifted in her seat and turned toward him. “What I don’t get is the CIA connection. What’s that about?” she asked.
Johnson put his foot down and changed up a gear. “It’s more complicated than I imagined. You’re not going to believe half of it.”
He ran Fiona through what he had learned about the Mossad connection to the Kudrows and the Israeli projects they had supported, the Brenner background, and the apparently tacit agreement between the Mossad and the CIA to leave Brenner alone, for different reasons on both sides.
“The question is, do I keep pursuing Brenner? And if I do, is it going to piss off the Israelis, and then what might the consequences be? Or do I just let the Mossad take care of Brenner? I don’t know what’s best,” Johnson said.
Fiona lurched forward in her seat, her voice rising. “You’re joking, right? You’ve got to keep going. This could make your career. And if you let the Mossad take care of Brenner, you’ll get the same outcome as if Ignacio takes care of him.”
“Yes, but you don’t know who you’re messing with here. You really don’t,” Johnson said.
“Don’t lose your nerve now, Joe. Let’s take it one step at a time.”
“Easy for you to say. I’d like to get to Brenner as quickly as possible,” Johnson said. “But you’ve insisted we go to Poland so you can get your evidence and we stop Brenner’s son walking off with a fortune in gold. So therefore, we’ve got to find a way to stop him somehow—and fast.”
Johnson did his best to calm himself. He didn’t want to start an argument, but Fiona clearly had no real idea how dangerous the waters in which they were now sailing were. Unlike her, he had seen what the Mossad’s Kidon unit was capable of.
“Okay, here’s an idea,” Fiona said. “We let the Polish police do our work for us. If we see the Argentinians go into the tunnel, we call the police and have them arrested, and then that cuts the chances of the old man being alerted and disappearing.”
Johnson inclined his head. “Yes, that’s one option. We definitely need to prevent Ignacio getting to his father before we do.”
He braked hard as a truck in front of them came to an abrupt halt at a set of traffic lights in a village.
The volume of traffic increased as they went farther south. There were few opportunities to pass, and Johnson could average no more than forty kilometers per hour. At least the snow had stopped.
“What do you think about your old boss Watson’s involvement with Brenner?” Fiona asked.
Johnson sighed. “He’s lost his moral compass, if he ever had one. He’s obviously been supporting the idea of using evil to fight evil, Nazis versus the Russians. I never agreed with that. So he’s spent decades protecting someone who committed multiple murders of defenseless Jews. Although, frankly, it’s probably coming from the top of the Agency.”
They were into the Owl Mountains now, running west of Walbryzch, and Johnson noted the occasional brown tourist sign flashing up in his headlights, pointing to some of the Nazi tunnel complexes open to the public. Podziemne Miasto Osówka, read one. Underground City of Osówka.
Tours of the old tunnels. The locals were still trying to capitalize on the Nazi occupation seven decades earlier. Who could blame them? It was probably the closest they would get to compensation from the Third Reich for the virtual destruction of their country during the war and then the grim, gray repression of the Soviet era that followed, Johnson mused. It would take a lot of tours to offset that damage.
Not far to go now.
It was nearly half past six by the time Johnson and Fiona reached Ludwikowice Klodzkie. From there they took a left onto a narrow tarmac road signposted Sokolec, then went through a tiny single-track tunnel underneath the railway line and up the valley. Dark trees flashed past in the headlights.
The railway line up which Jacob, Daniel, and nineteen other Jews passed, crammed into a filthy railway cattle car, exhausted, frail, and starving under the malevolent eye of Erich Brenner, almost seventy years ago.
After a mile and a half, on the left, they found Hotel Sowa, “Owl Hotel,” next to a lake.
Johnson pulled into the loose gravel parking lot, which was empty apart from three other Polish-registered cars. He turned the ignition off and leaned back in his seat.
His phone beeped. It was a message from Vic.
Joe. Went back to pull out Brenner’s file to copy it for you. It had disappeared. Archive staff don’t know what happened to it. It was only three hours after I took it out the first time. God knows what’s going on. Will make further inquiries and let you know. Vic
Johnson banged his hand down on the car steering wheel. What the hell? Now he was completely dependent on Ben and Clara digging out the files he needed in D.C. and Berlin.
He and Fiona climbed out of the car. Hotel Sowa was a basic, low-slung single-story structure with overhanging eaves that reminded Johnson of the roadside motels on the routes in and out of Portland.
They were about to walk through a heavy, half-glazed wooden door into the central reception area when Johnson glanced to his right.
That was when he saw it, tucked away behind some bushes in another small parking area. A silver Ford Focus with British plates.
Chapter Forty-Two
Friday, December 2, 2011
Sokolec, Poland
Johnson pushed open the door into the reception area and made his way across the red carpet to an old-fashioned dark wooden desk, behind which stood a grim-looking blond woman in her thirties, wearing steel-rimmed glasses.
She obviously had a well-practiced eye for the nationalities of her guests and offered a half-hearted greeting in passable English.
Johnson did his best to conjure a smile. “Hello, we are staying here tonight, but first we have a meeting with two Argentine men whom we are trying to find. Have you seen them here? One blond, one dark-haired.”
The woman, whose garlic-laden breath caused Johnson to recoil slightly, nodded. “Yes, they’re staying here. They arrived late last night, but they went out very early this morning, about an hour ago. They didn’t say where they were going.”
“Ah. But that’s their car parked over there, is it?” Johnson nodded his head in the direction of the small parking area where the Ford Focus stood.
“I believe that is theirs, yes,” the woman said.
“So they were walking when they left this morning, I assume?”
“I don’t know.”
Johnson guessed the two Argentinians had arrived late and had bedded down for a few hours sleep. They were probably right now somewhere in the tunnels complex searching for the boxes of Third Reich gold bars.
He thanked the receptionist, then turned to Fiona and jerked his thumb in the direction of the parking lot. “Let’s go.” He began to walk toward the main door.
Outside in the parking lot, the only sounds were those of the water in the lake lapping against a pebbly beach in front of the hotel and the twit-twoo of owls in the trees to their left.
Across the other side of the lake rose the looming silhouette of Gontowa Mountain. It was more a large hill than a mountain, its outline clearly visible against the sky.
What would my mother think now? She who spent months in a concentration camp only a few miles up the valley.
Johnson took out his phone, switched on his maps app, and consulted the printed paper map from Jacob Kudrow’s office. He studied it for a moment, then punched in some coordinates: 50°38'33.4" N 16°28'02.6" E
Earlier, a short distance before they had reached the hotel, Johnson had noticed in his car headlights a rough gravel track to the left that appeared to lead in the approximate direction of the mountain and the tunnels.
He pointed out the detail on the map to Fiona. “I’m certain they will have gone that way. It’s the only obvious route to the tunnel entrance. If it gets messy, you’ll have to leave things to me. You just get out of there and make sure you look after
yourself. You okay with that?”
She nodded.
“Right, let’s go,” Johnson said. “We’re already an hour behind them.”
The first pale blue light of dawn crept over the horizon to the east as Johnson, followed by Fiona, walked out of the parking lot. After they passed a house on their right, Johnson veered up the farm track he had noticed earlier. It consisted of two parallel tractor tracks paved with crushed stone, a strip of grass between them.
The track led northwest, past the other side of the house, through some trees, and over a field toward a denser copse of trees on the other side.
Johnson rechecked the maps app on his phone before continuing out of the copse, left across the grass and inside the line of the trees, mostly pines. They climbed cautiously and silently up the hillside and into denser woodland consisting of pines, rhododendron bushes, and some brambles.
Johnson finally saw what he was looking for. Around twenty yards ahead of him was a small square concrete structure, so heavily laden with moss and ivy that it was scarcely visible amid the trees and bushes grown up around it. It had a deeply rusted metal grill, around three-and-a-half feet square, which was hinged on the right-hand side. The grill was open at a right angle.
Then, through the trees, came voices.
Johnson pulled Fiona down behind a rhododendron bush, its thick dark leaves providing good cover.
One man emerged backward from the grill, bent double and crouching to avoid banging his head, around which was strapped a bright headlamp. He was carrying one end of a wooden box. Johnson recognized the man from the photograph that Jayne had sent him. His receding light brown hair and deep tan was unmistakable.
Ignacio Guzmann.
As he continued backward, another man, dark-haired this time, came into view, holding the other end of the box. He too wore a headlamp that shone brightly into the predawn gloom. That must be Diego Ruiz.
As soon as they were clear of the grill, they lowered the box gently to the ground and stood out of breath, hands on hips, their black jackets, pants, and wool hats covered in dust, sand, and grime.
Ignacio felt no dissipation of the tension that had held him in an iron grip for the previous several days. His objective was so close, he could almost touch it. And yet . . .
One box of gold was out of the tunnel, only three more to go, and then half of his task would be done. After that, there was just one remaining objective left to be completed in Argentina.
His big concern, however, was the two Americans, Johnson and Heppenstall, and whether they were on his tail. But all he and Diego could do now was to work as fast as possible before time ran out.
The map he had obtained from young Oliver Kew’s laptop had been incredibly accurate, providing measurements and coordinates that had taken him to the entrance of the emergency tunnel.
And the narrow tunnel itself, despite being flooded in places and, due to a few partial roof collapses, occasionally difficult to navigate, was in better condition than he had expected.
The only notable obstacle had been the three trip wires, which were marked on the map but were nevertheless extremely difficult to spot in the darkness of the tunnel, even with the help of powerful headlamps.
Ignacio couldn’t see what the trip wires were attached to, as they disappeared into a tangle of tree roots and sand. Neither could he tell whether they were active or not. He had to assume they were linked to some kind of explosive.
He stood in the cold dawn until he’d gotten his breath back. It had taken more than twenty minutes for him and Diego to carry the twenty-kilogram box out of the tunnel.
It was heavy and quite bulky, and given the trip wires, Ignacio had thought it safer for them both to carry the box.
Now he changed his mind. Speed was important. Three more individual trips would take more than an hour and twenty minutes, not including the return journeys. That was too long.
“Bien, Diego, let’s get the next couple of boxes out. I think this time we just take one each. It will be quicker. We don’t know if anyone is going to come.”
Diego nodded. “Yep, they’re not as heavy as I expected.”
Ignacio stood thinking for a few more moments.
“Come on, jefe, we need to move,” Diego said.
“Give me a second. I’m just thinking. I can imagine my father working here, sixty-seven years ago. Probably tall, arrogant, wearing an SS uniform, and terrifying the hell out of a bunch of half-dead Jews.”
The documents he had found, including the disciplinary letter about the killings, had told him all he needed to know. He was certain there must have been many more murders, too. He shook his head at the image.
How did my father and a whole generation of Germans fall in behind Hitler’s bullshit, turning some of them into mindless killers who would follow instructions without question?
Then he checked himself. Who am I to judge? Me, a killer myself.
“What’s up, jefe?”
Ignacio turned around. “Nothing. Vale, vamos, let’s go. I’ll go first.” He led the way back into the sewer, dropping to his knees and crawling through a mess of mud, old leaves, and animal droppings.
After a short distance, he saw the square opening above him that led into the escape tunnel. Without the map, he would almost certainly never have seen it.
He hoisted himself up and climbed into the gap. Then he crawled until the roof became high enough for him to stand up and walk.
Beyond that, the tunnel was like something out of the goblin stories his mother had sometimes read to him as a child: protruding tree roots, rocks sticking out at odd angles, water dripping from the roof, piles of sandy soil on the floor where the tunnel ceiling had collapsed, and green slime everywhere.
Ignacio made his way slowly forward, searching for the first trip wire. There it was, at shin height, pulled taut and difficult to spot with its rust coating against the dirty, sandy floor.
He stepped carefully over it.
Ignacio turned and watched as Diego also slowly navigated the trip wire.
The going was a little easier now.
It was another fifty or so meters to the next trip wire. Ignacio was forced to take extreme care on the wet, slimy rock surface just before it. He eased himself over the wire to safety.
Ignacio looked back again. Diego was now out of sight and some distance behind him, although he could see the faint glow from his headlamp around a corner.
He walked a little farther, where he had to squeeze past a large pile of rock and soil that was almost blocking the passage; it had fallen a long time ago, judging by the amount of green algae covering it.
Once past that, he decided to wait for his colleague and sat down on a rock in the nook between the tunnel wall and the pile of debris, leaving him with a glimpse of the approaching Diego.
The barrel of his Browning, in a small holster at his side, dug into his hip, so he took it out and placed it on a smaller rock to his left.
Finally, Diego arrived at the second trip wire. His right foot landed on the same piece of slime-covered rock that Ignacio had negotiated a few moments before.
Diego’s boot slipped and slid sharply backward, throwing his weight forward. He tried to correct himself by pushing his left leg in front of him, but he stumbled and lost his balance.
In order to avoid falling facedown on a stone surface, Diego instinctively threw his right arm out in front of him. As it came down, his forearm crashed hard into the taut trip wire.
The last thing Ignacio saw was a massive white flash and he heard a deafening bang. He felt a searing heat, and a tsunami of dust and soil hit him in the face.
Just before he passed out, Ignacio sensed a second explosion coming from the opposite direction.
Chapter Forty-Three
Friday, December 2, 2011
Sokolec, Poland
Johnson and Fiona sat behind the rhododendron bush for at least ten minutes after the two Argentinians had disappeared into the tunnel.
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br /> By then it was light enough to see back down the hill to the lake below them and the hotel beyond that.
Then, finally confident that Ignacio and Diego weren’t going to reemerge for a while, Johnson walked to the entrance to the sewer. He peered into the void, as if examining a display in a museum.
Fiona joined him, then took her camera from her bag and took a few photographs of the entrance.
“I don’t think we should go in there now,” Fiona said. “What we could do instead is just jam this grill shut so those two are locked in. Then we leave and call the police from a distance.”
Johnson considered the idea. “Yes, not bad, I like that.”
He walked around the entrance to the sewer and climbed on top of the mound of earth into which it was set. From there he could see farther up the hill through a clear channel between the trees.
Just as he stepped up, there was a muffled roar from the direction in which he was looking. A plume of dust and smoke rose into the air a hundred yards away, just in front of the trees. Seconds later, there was another smaller boom, with more smoke, from inside the trees.
From his vantage point, Johnson could see the explosion had created a large crater in the ground.
“Shit!” Johnson said. “What was that? I think they’ve triggered the damned booby trap down there. Leopold warned me about it.”
The sound of the explosion echoed around the valley, a low-pitched rumble that reverberated from one side to the other.
Then, silence. Even the birds had stopped singing.
Johnson stepped forward. “We’d better go take a look.”
They walked cautiously toward the crater, skirting around large bushes and pine trees as they went, until they arrived at the sink hole.
Across a rectangular area around twenty-five yards long by around three yards wide, the surface of the forest, thousands of tons of earth and rock, had sunk downward by about ten feet.
A couple of large pine trees growing on the fringe of the sunken area had fallen over completely, and another tree was now lurching at a dangerous forty-five-degree angle.
The Last Nazi (A Joe Johnson Thriller, Book 1) Page 31