Then Jayne jerked up in her seat and pointed. A large black Mercedes idled slowly around the other side of the oval and parked outside Brenner’s house, next to the Renault.
“That’s Brenner’s Mercedes,” Jayne said. “He used it to go to the café.”
Johnson had just taken a second cigarette from his pack. Before he could light up, the black front door of Brenner’s house opened, and two men emerged through the metal gate onto the sidewalk.
At the front, upright but frail looking, was a white-haired old man carrying a silver-topped cane. He was limping noticeably.
Johnson realized he was holding his breath.
“That’s Brenner,” said Jayne, unnecessarily.
Behind Brenner was Ignacio. Another dark-haired man jumped out of the driver’s seat of the Mercedes and walked over to them.
There was an argument going on. The old man appeared to be pushed from behind by his son. He stumbled and almost fell, and as he moved forward, Johnson caught a clear glimpse of gun metal in Ignacio’s hand.
The other man leapt forward and grabbed Brenner by the coat, preventing him from tumbling.
When he recovered his balance, Brenner turned and said something angrily to his son, waving his stick in the air. There was a furious exchange of words, too far out of earshot from the Hilux.
The two men bundled Brenner into the back of the Mercedes, and Ignacio climbed into the other rear seat. The other man then ran back into the house, picked up a couple of bags, threw them into the trunk, and got into the driver’s seat.
A second later, the black Mercedes shot off down Ombú with a squeal of tires.
Jayne quickly started the Toyota’s engine, let out the clutch, and followed. “The circus is on the move,” she said, flicking on the sat nav.
She had difficulty keeping up with the Mercedes. It flew around the corner, onto Avenida Figueroa Alcorta, and accelerated through a set of red traffic lights at a junction near the Galileo Galilei planetarium and through an underpass with an array of messy political graffiti scrawled on the concrete sidewalls in letters more than two feet high: No Layoffs, No Job Cuts. General Strike Now!
Jayne rammed the Hilux into fifth and overtook a Porsche on the inside as the Mercedes sped onto the four-lane ring road, heading northwest.
“Have you got those Berettas you mentioned?” Johnson asked.
“Yep. They’re in the glove compartment.” Jayne was staring intently at the traffic now, concentrating hard as the Mercedes surged forward. Without taking her eyes off the road, she picked up a map from between the front seats and gave it to Johnson. “Just use that and the sat nav and keep an eye on where we’re going. I remember a lot of these roads, but it’s been many years since I’ve lived here, so I’m can’t recall all of them.”
Johnson took the map, then opened the glove compartment and removed one of the Berettas. “Nice,” he said.
He removed the magazine and racked the slide back, ensuring there were no live rounds in the chamber. Then he checked the magazine was full, put it back in, and clicked the safety catch off, then on again. “It’ll do the job. Thanks.” He repeated the process with the other Beretta.
“So, where exactly did you get these?” Johnson asked.
Jayne told him about Carlos, throwing in a few stories for good measure about his antics while operating as her agent in the late ’90s.
In the back seat, Fiona chuckled away at a tale about how Jayne had persuaded Carlos to act as the middleman in a transaction whereby a naval mine was smuggled out of the Argentine naval base at Río Gallegos, at the southern tip of the country, and taken to Britain.
“You obviously won’t mind if I report those stories,” Fiona said.
Jayne grimaced. “You can try,” she said, “But I warn you, Carlos has a long reach.”
After a while, the Mercedes moved onto an off-ramp, this time moving onto National Route 9, a six-lane sprawling river of traffic, still heading northwest. Mile after mile of residential suburbs flew past: Boulogne, El Talar, followed by the industrial units of Ricardo Rojas.
While the traffic was heavy, Johnson wasn’t worried that Ignacio might spot them. There were too many cars on the road, and Jayne was driving in textbook fashion, keeping a reasonable distance between the two vehicles.
But then, as the buildings began to thin out near the outer suburbs and green fields appeared to the right of the road, the traffic lightened and tailing became trickier. The Mercedes accelerated again. Johnson checked the speedometer, which showed 150 kilometers an hour.
“Just hang back,” Johnson said. “Give him several hundred yards now.” He knew it was going to be difficult to avoid being spotted, but without the advantages of an organized CIA-style operation, with multiple vehicles and communication between them, the chances of being noticed were higher the further they went out of the built-up city suburbs.
“Do you have binoculars?” Johnson asked.
To his surprise, Jayne told him to look under his seat, where he found a pair of powerful Carl Zeiss 20x42 optics. “Was that Carlos as well?” he asked. She nodded.
With Johnson manning the binoculars, they felt confident enough to drop back even farther behind the Mercedes.
Jayne wiped her hand across her forehead. “Good thing I refilled with diesel beforehand. Who knows where this is going to end up,” she said.
At the small city of Campana, the Mercedes veered across three lanes and down an exit leading to National Route 12. Jayne followed.
Soon they were on a seemingly never-ending suspension bridge spanning the vast brown waters of the Paraná River. The river was busy with oceangoing container and cargo ships mostly heading east, where Johnson assumed they would join the River Plate and then make their way to the Atlantic.
Two enormous towers stood in the center of the river, from which an array of tree-trunk-size steel cables supported the bridge running beneath.
Beyond the riverbanks were flat green expanses of fields crisscrossed with huge electricity pylons and cables. “These all carry power to Buenos Aires from the hydro schemes,” Jayne said.
She glanced at the river. “I sailed up and down here in ’97 with some visitors from New York. Drank gin and got pissed with them and kept telling them it was South America’s second longest river, over and over. They got irritated as hell.”
Johnson smiled. He remembered well how Jane loved to share facts and history when plastered. He’d always thought it rather endearing, actually.
“I’m sure they did,” he said.
Jayne chuckled. “I may have given them a bit of a lecture on the story behind the dams and hydroelectric projects farther upstream, as well.”
In the back seat, Fiona was on the phone with somebody. It sounded as though it was her editor, judging by the scraps of conversation Johnson could hear over the noise of the car engine screaming, the wind whistling outside, and Jayne’s conversation.
He tried to listen to what Fiona was saying without making it obvious to Jayne. He didn’t want to make her any more aware of the journalist and the exposure that came with her than she probably already was. Fiona mentioned something about proof and documents. His ears pricked up. She was arguing; that much he could make out.
Johnson clung to the passenger door handle as Jayne swerved into the outside lane to pass a slow-moving truck, cutting off a speeding motorcyclist as she did so.
He was starting to become concerned about Jayne. Had she slept at all? “Are you okay?” he asked. “I can take a turn driving if you need a rest.”
“Yes, good idea. Thanks,” she said, braking to a halt so they could switch.
The sky, which had been cloudless when they had set off, had become completely overcast. Now high, light-gray clouds were starting to give way to lower, much darker ones, some of them practically black.
Johnson could see it was going to take all their effort to keep up with the powerful Mercedes and ensure it didn’t turn unnoticed off the main highway. Now t
hat it was getting darker, the binoculars were of less help.
Jayne’s phone rang. She clamped it to her left ear. “It’s Carlos,” she muttered to Johnson, who was now focused on the road.
“Hello, Carlos! . . . Thanks for your help with all the, um, equipment. Perfecto . . . No, we’re not still in the city. We’re about 140 kilometers north, trying to keep up with the guy I told you about . . . God knows where we’re heading . . . Yes, we’ll be way up north if we keep going like this . . . Brazil? I hope not . . . What weather forecast? Ah, well . . . sounds bad. Just one other thing. If you can do what you can to ensure we don’t get held up by police checkpoints, that would be helpful. Thanks. I’ll keep in touch.”
She ended the call and looked at Johnson. “This guy’s driving like he’s on drugs. He’s doing 170 now, at least. I hope we don’t blow up this Toyota. Oh, and Carlos says there’s an awful weather forecast for up north. Rain, lightning storms, and high winds, all blowing down from Brazil. There’s already flooding up there. Possibly tornadoes, too.” She sighed. “Just what we need.”
Chapter Fifty
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Posadas, Argentina
The bad weather held off for much longer than Carlos had predicted. In fact, the rain stayed away until they had been driving north for nearly nine hours.
But when the rain did start, it was torrential. Lashing jets of water drove hard into the windshield of the Hilux, forcing Johnson to slow the truck to below forty kilometers an hour.
It was difficult to concentrate behind the wheel for long periods in such conditions, so Johnson and Jayne traded spots fairly frequently.
Now, with the darkness and the rain, Johnson agreed with Jayne that they should get much closer to Brenner’s Mercedes. That meant the risk of being spotted was higher, so Johnson could only hope that Ignacio was not carrying out proper countersurveillance. There had been no obvious sign of it. But even though they were driving closer, visibility of the Mercedes was still poor, which made Johnson nervous.
Jayne, by contrast, seemed relaxed about the risk of losing sight of the Mercedes. When Johnson mentioned this, she simply shook his head.
“Don’t worry, all under control,” she said. “I have a plan B—we won’t lose him.” She reached for her phone, which she had mounted on the dashboard, tapped on an app, and showed Johnson a map on the screen. In the center were two dots—one green, one blue—that were moving slowly along a road.
“The green one,” Jayne said, “is the Mercedes. There’s a magnetic GPS tracking device which mysteriously became attached to its undercarriage. Don’t ask me how. We’re the blue dot. We won’t lose him.”
Johnson managed a smile for the first time in several hours. “You could have mentioned that before. You got that gadget from Carlos, I assume?”
“Correct. He’s expensive but he’s first class.”
There were other vehicles that continually appeared and reappeared during the long journey north, too. Johnson and Jayne, working as a team across the rearview and side mirrors, kept a close eye on them, the thought of a tail working under Watto’s or the Mossad’s instructions at the forefront of Johnson’s mind. But each time, Johnson could tell they were genuine tourists, locals, or businessmen. There were no vehicles or faces that caused him concern, even among the occasional repeats that popped up, and no evidence of coverage, which surprised him.
The road started to resemble the Paraná River, a short distance to their left, the path of which they now seemed to be following to the north.
The red, mineral-laden earth that formed the subsoil of the entire region was being washed across the road in streams as the gutters failed to cope with the runoff from the rain.
“Rivers of blood. Let’s hope the weather’s not a metaphor for what’s going on in that Mercedes,” Fiona said from the back seat.
Huge rolling thunderclaps barreled across the countryside as jagged forks of white-hot lightning jerked down from a dark sky.
Johnson took another turn behind the wheel, while Jayne shifted to the passenger seat. They both declined Fiona’s offer to take a turn at driving. “Best that we drive for this kind of surveillance operation,” Jayne said.
The unspoken understanding was that Fiona simply wouldn’t have had the training to achieve the right blend of distance, speed, and position to best blend into the background and avoid detection. As it was, Johnson felt he was operating at the outer limits of his somewhat rusty skill set, especially operating as a solo car, and Jayne, deskbound for so long, was similarly out of practice.
Apart from staying awake, Johnson quickly realized that one tricky issue was refueling.
The Mercedes had been the first to pull into a gas station earlier that afternoon after about five hundred kilometers, and Johnson, not wanting to risk stopping at the same place, told Jayne to continue driving until she got to the next station, which was thankfully a short distance later.
“We need to be quick, quick, like the Formula One guys,” he said. “Make it a pit stop. Fuel, food, piss, back in the car.” After filling the Toyota with diesel, Johnson went with Fiona into the small shop to buy a few snacks and sandwiches. Jayne followed, adding a pack of high-strength caffeine tablets to their basket. “Looks like we’re in for an all-nighter. We’ll need these,” she said.
Now, at just before ten o’clock in the evening, with the trip meter in the Hilux showing 920 kilometers, fuel was running low again. After another stop near Posadas, the capital of the Misiones province, which sat on the eastern bank of the Paraná, they were off again.
Before they’d gotten back on the road, Jayne took both Berettas and the spare magazines from the glove compartment, lifted the rear seat, and stashed the guns and ammunition in a concealed storage compartment underneath. She removed her holster, took Johnson’s, and put them with the guns.
“Police checkpoints?” Johnson guessed, as she climbed into the passenger seat.
“Yes,” Jayne said. “North from here—they’re notorious. Unless things have changed, they’ll take a couple of hundred dollars off us at each one, since we’re foreigners. I don’t want to give them an excuse to make it more. We’re supposed to have permits and paperwork for these guns. Lots of people don’t bother, but hopefully they won’t do a thorough search. They’re usually too lazy, and anyway, I’ve asked Carlos to smooth our path.”
Jayne swallowed two of the caffeine tablets and accelerated out of the gas station.
She checked the tracker app on her phone. “It looks like those guys are heading for Puerto Iguazú now,” Jayne said. “That’s my best guess.”
“How far?” asked Johnson.
“I did this journey a few times in the ’90s,” Jayne said. “Normally four hours heading north from here, about three hundred kilometers. But in this storm, I think it’ll be a lot longer. We’ll struggle to move much faster than forty or fifty kilometers an hour on these roads and with this amount of water.”
Johnson looked at her, his bottom lip hanging at the prospect of an all-night drive. “Three hundred kilometers? What is Puerto Iguazú anyway?”
The driving rain battered the windshield hard now.
“It’s a small city tucked in next to the Paraguay and Brazil borders,” Jayne said. “A big tourist center for the Iguazú waterfalls. But the underworld’s in charge there; there’s no real border controls, and it’s all about drug trafficking, people trafficking, terrorists, and organized crime. You name it. The police are corrupt and do nothing. I did a report on it for the SIS because we were worried about weapons being smuggled from there into Northern Ireland.”
“Sounds all a bit Wild West,” Johnson said.
“Yeah, that’s one way of putting it. One of the big illegal activities is fake jewelry, watches, and so on, which get sold to tourists visiting the waterfalls. Mafia-type gangs have it all carved up.”
Jayne became quiet and concentrated on the road through the pitch black and the driving rain. At least the
road was smooth blacktop. But there were no white line markings, and at times it was hard to see where they were going.
To add to their problems, large numbers of heavy trucks crawled in both directions through the storm, making it almost impossible to pass, apart from when they hit the odd section of two-lane divided highway.
“This is ridiculous. We need to get a move on,” Johnson said. “I’m worried that even if Ignacio doesn’t kill the old man, someone from the Mossad will appear and do it, or the CIA will come and spirit him away.”
Fiona stuck her head between them. “I’m surprised that if the Mossad or the CIA were planning to do something, it hasn’t happened yet.”
“Who knows what’s going on behind the scenes,” Johnson said. “What I’ve learned with the likes of them is we’re never really in control. There’s always some higher being pulling strings. And I don’t mean God, I mean Watto.”
Johnson suspected that Watson ran a variety of unofficial operations outside the scheduled CIA ones he was responsible for.
He glanced behind him at Fiona, who nodded. He felt tired now, but he couldn’t switch off and sleep. His thoughts wandered.
Was Brenner dead, lying by the roadside? Had they passed him somewhere in a ditch? The GPS tracker couldn’t tell him that.
As they drove, the green dot on Jayne’s phone screen gradually pulled farther and farther ahead of them.
Chapter Fifty-One
Monday, December 5, 2011
Wolftrap, Virginia
Watson sat in the study of his gray brick house and, through the gray light of dawn, looked down the garden toward the thick woodland that ran on either side of Difficult Run River.
The CIA veteran remained still. All he could hear was the tiny gurgle of hot water circulating through the radiators and pipes of his central heating system. There were no other sounds in the house; indeed, there was nobody else there to make a sound.
The Last Nazi (A Joe Johnson Thriller, Book 1) Page 36