The Last Nazi (A Joe Johnson Thriller, Book 1)

by Andrew Turpin

  Fiona cleared her throat. “Yes, I’ve seen them, and I fully intend to write the story about your father. But you don’t have to kill him, like Joe says. We can take him to court.”

  Keep him talking, Fiona.

  “And there’s another thing,” Fiona continued. “There’s a story about to break. David Kudrow’s stepping down shortly. I had a text message from his campaign manager earlier.”

  She looked apologetically at Johnson, who raised his eyebrows, feeling suddenly irritated that she hadn’t mentioned it before.

  “They’re issuing a press statement in Washington this morning announcing he’s pulling out of the race,” Fiona continued. “The reality is he’s realized that at some stage, Inside Track is going to run the story about his finances and the gold, and it’s going to go viral, so he’s stepping down first. But he’s going to say it’s due to personal reasons: the campaign is too much of an intrusion into his family time. Prospect of the presidency is too much. He has a business to run, et cetera, et cetera, you know the routine.”

  Johnson could tell she was nervous—understandably so, given Ignacio’s threats—by the way she was tripping over her words. But he needed to keep the conversation going.

  “So all the detail about the Kudrows reselling Hitler’s gold? That’ll now go in the story about him quitting, I assume?” Johnson asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know what my boss will do about that. The problem is, we still need actual physical proof of what they’ve done, don’t we? That’s why I wanted photographs from the tunnels. Yes, we’ve seen invoices of sales to Argentina from years ago but nothing to show what was actually sold, let alone where it came from. Services—that’s all it said on the invoices. David would just deny it all.” She cast a tentative glance toward Ignacio.

  Johnson scratched the nick in his right ear. “Don’t tell me we’ve wasted our time. Why did Nathaniel do it, leak the story I mean? Was he just pissed that he didn’t get any benefit from the gold, while his brother did? Was it a jealousy—”

  “That’s what I wanted to know,” Ignacio interrupted. “I never found out.”

  Johnson heard one of the cell phones lying on the table ping as a text message arrived, followed by another, and then yet another.

  Fiona took a step toward the table, but Ignacio pointed the gun at her. “Leave that phone alone. We’ve done enough talking. It’s time to finish things off in here now. I’ve waited long enough.”

  Johnson cursed inwardly. From outside, he thought he heard a faint thud and then a groan, but nobody else seemed to notice.

  Ignacio grabbed a wooden chair from behind the table and put it next to the one in which his father was sitting.

  Then, he aimed his gun at Johnson.

  “You, Johnson, sit here. Now. I can’t afford to take any more risks with you. You’re going to have to go, as well. You and your pathetic justice.” He almost spat the words out.

  Ignacio reached behind him, eyes still on Johnson, and took a small cardboard folder from the table. A couple of sheets of paper fell out of it. Johnson could see they looked like the originals of Brenner’s SS documents, from which Ignacio had e-mailed scanned pages to him.

  The old man Brenner then spoke for the first time since they had entered the garage. “Where did you get those from? Tell me. And where are my guards who work here,” he said in a faint voice, almost a whisper.

  “Never mind where I got the papers. I’m going to give them to our reporter Fiona here so she can tell the whole world what you did—so they will know why you’ve had a bullet through your evil, wrinkled head,” Ignacio said. “And my two guards are working here now. I’ve sent yours away.”

  Johnson still hadn’t moved.

  Ignacio stepped toward him, his face contorted, his eyes narrowed, his lips pressed tight . . . with what? Johnson didn’t know if it was just rage, frustration, or disappointment. Then Ignacio said in a lower, threatening tone, “Move. Sit down.” Johnson noticed that Ignacio’s right hand, which held the gun, shook a little.

  Johnson put his hands up and shuffled to the chair, then sat.

  Ignacio walked a couple of paces and stood in front of his father, his back to the smaller garage door. Johnson sat in front of him to his right, his hands still raised.

  Ignacio held out his pistol, the barrel pointing at Johnson.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Johnson saw a shadow creeping forward along the narrow beam of sunlight shining through the partly open door. It moved behind Ignacio, and then Johnson began to see the outline of a person’s head and shoulders. Then, at one side, the shape of a raised hand.

  Jayne.

  Ignacio was in full flow now, spitting hatred in Spanish at his father, oblivious to what was happening around him. “This is for you, for what you did to me and to all the others you’ve killed and tortured. It’s for those women outside. This is the point where the dog, as you called me, the dog returns home, tail between his legs, then turns and rips his owner’s throat out.”

  He lowered the barrel until it was pointing at his father’s head.

  At that moment, the shaven-headed Lopez Seguridad guard must have noticed the shadow at the door. “Ignacio, watch out, behind you,” he yelled.

  Ignacio turned.

  From behind him came a deafening gunshot, a pause, and then another; they echoed around the garage. Then three further shots, at least one of which zinged into the plastered ceiling, bringing down a large chunk of it with a flurry of debris.

  Ignacio gave an agonized scream as he stumbled forward. The gun fell from his hand and clattered to the floor in front of Johnson.

  Blood spurted from Ignacio’s right shoulder onto the floor, instantly turning his shirt crimson. Two round black holes punctured the material. His right arm fell uselessly by his side, and he clutched his shoulder with his left hand. His mouth hung open and his eyes bulged.

  Suddenly Fiona shouted, “Joe, the guard. His gun.”

  Johnson turned his head and saw the shaven-headed guard raising his pistol. “Jayne, dive,” he shouted. Johnson threw himself off the chair and onto the floor as the guard pulled the trigger.

  As he did so, Jayne fired off more rapid shots at the guard from her now-prone position on the floor. The first two caused more plasterwork in both the ceiling and the walls to explode into the air.

  The third shot flung the security guard back, and blood sprayed behind him as Jayne’s round struck him somewhere near his right collar bone.

  Johnson rolled under the table. In the same moment, he saw Fiona hit the floor.

  There was a loud revving and a squeal of tires from outside, and then behind Ignacio, the two large garage doors burst open as the rear end of a Jeep smashed through the woodwork and came to a halt a couple of yards into the garage. The moustachioed guard sat at the wheel.

  One garage door swung back on its hinges at high speed and crashed into the garage wall; the other one splintered into two pieces.

  In a flash, Ignacio ran to one of the rear doors of the car, opened it, and jumped in, blood spurting from his shoulder, leaving a crimson trail behind him.

  “Hit him, Jayne,” Johnson shouted. But he could see Jayne desperately trying to replace the magazine on her pistol.

  The Jeep’s engine revved loudly, the doors slammed, and with a squeal of tires spinning on concrete, the vehicle shot out of the garage and down the road.

  Johnson turned and, just a few feet away, saw Fiona lying on her side on the floor, her back facing him. He yelled at her as he got up. “Fiona, you okay?”

  But she didn’t move. Johnson reached out and pulled at her shoulder.

  It was only when he rolled Fiona onto her back that he saw blood pulsing from a bullet wound at the top of her left arm. She also had a large red gash and bruise on the side of her temple.

  She lay there faceup, arms and legs spread wide, her head lolling sideways.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Monday, December 5, 2011

&
nbsp; Puerto Iguazú

  Johnson stared at Fiona for a second or two, struggling to take in what had happened. He put both hands to his forehead, momentarily torn between his instinct to stay by Fiona’s side and help her and his desire to stop Ignacio before he disappeared.

  The roar of the Jeep’s engine from outside decided it for him. He grabbed his Beretta, which still lay on the table, and ran out, closely followed by Jayne, who had slotted a fresh magazine into her gun. But by then, the Jeep was already fifty yards away and accelerating down the red dirt road.

  Speedily, Johnson flicked off the safety, leveled the gun, and fired two quick shots at the vehicle. The first bullet crashed into the bodywork at the back, and the second shattered the rear window; but the vehicle kept going, and by that time there was so much dust flying up behind it that his third shot, together with two fired by Jayne, missed altogether.

  The Jeep flew around a bend, behind some trees, and down the slope toward the river, leaving a trail of red dust that floated gently in the breeze.

  At the bottom of the hill, next to some rocks where there was a small inlet off the main river, a boat waited, its two outboard motors throwing off exhaust fumes.

  Jayne looked distraught. “Sorry, I just couldn’t reload fast enough. It’s my fault. Quick, let’s get after them. I’ll fetch the Toyota.”

  Johnson grabbed Jayne by the forearm and held on. He stared into the distance. “There’s no way we’re going to catch them. They’ll be on that boat in a minute. It’ll take us too long to get the Hilux. We’ve got no chance.”

  He turned quickly and headed back toward the garage. “Fiona’s hurt in there. Better go and check on her.”

  Johnson entered the garage, followed by Jayne, and went straight to Fiona. She groaned and opened her eyes, then closed them again.

  “Okay, Fiona, don’t move,” he said and held her wrist for a few seconds. “Pulse feels fine. I think she’ll be okay, but we need to stop this bleeding. I think she banged her head when she fell down. Look at that gash on her temple.”

  Johnson grabbed a couple of cushions from a chair in the corner. He put one behind Fiona’s head and ripped the cover off the other. Then he took a penknife from his pocket and cut the sleeve off Fiona’s shirt. It appeared the round had gone straight through the soft flesh of her upper arm but had thankfully missed the bone. It had left a messy, ragged wound that was bleeding heavily. Johnson hesitated for a second and then pressed the material hard against the bullet wound. “I don’t think there’s much else I can do. The hospital will have to sort it out.”

  He scanned around the garage and spotted a roll of brown sticky tape on a bench. “There, get that tape,” he said, “I’ll bandage her up best I can. Not ideal.”

  Jayne fetched the tape, and Johnson wound it tightly around Fiona’s shoulder and upper arm so it held the cloth firmly in place. “That’s the best I can do.”

  Fiona opened her eyes again. She had turned very pale and was clearly in a lot of pain, but Johnson could see she was breathing steadily.

  Johnson turned and walked to the Lopez Seguridad guard who Jayne had shot. He lay groaning on the floor at the rear of the garage and bleeding heavily from a wound to his shoulder, which Johnson inspected briefly. It seemed as though the round had shattered his collar bone.

  Johnson turned back to Jayne. “This is going to be difficult. Here’s what I suggest. We’ll get out of here now, before the police come. We’ll call an ambulance for this security guard, and we’ll drop Fiona off at the hospital. I don’t want to leave her, but she’s obviously going to need to stay in the hospital. We have to get this old bastard Brenner back to Buenos Aires somehow. And we need to be quick. You can bet the Mossad and probably the CIA will be on to us. If we can just get him into the U.S. or British embassy, we’ve got a chance. How about if I talk to the U.S., you speak to the U.K., and then I’ll call the war crimes authorities. We’ll need to work out a process. I just hope Argentina cooperates.”

  Johnson tried to mentally check through what else he needed to do before they left. A first priority was to collect evidence. He bent over and carefully picked up the originals of Brenner’s SS documents, then replaced them in the folder, which he tucked under his arm. He walked to the table and looked at the four phones that lay there. One was his, one was Jayne’s, which he handed to her, and another was Fiona’s.

  Johnson scrutinized the fourth device. A quick check of the phone’s address book, mostly consisting of SolGold staff members, told him it was Brenner’s. Johnson stared at the former Nazi, who still sat secured in his chair. The sight triggered an image in his mind of his mother being whipped and caused a slight involuntary gagging reflex in Johnson. He felt bile rise inside his throat, which he quickly held back, swallowing hard.

  It suddenly struck Johnson that amid the chaos, he hadn’t yet spoken to Brenner. He felt an urge to deliver some kind of speech outlining exactly why he was going to turn the old man over to the judicial authorities and make Brenner remember the way he had tortured his mother. But the thought dissipated quickly, partly because it seemed superfluous, partly because he knew they needed to get out of the area, and fast. In any case, he knew Brenner wouldn’t remember her. Why would he?

  Instead, he just held the former SS officer’s gaze. The pale blue eyes that Johnson imagined had once burned bright with venom and racist fervor were almost milky and pathetic.

  He turned to fully face the old Nazi. “Just for the record,” Johnson said quietly, “I’m Joe Johnson, a war crimes investigator. I’m going to make sure you go back where you came from, to Germany, so the Central Office can deal with you, like they dealt with John Demjanjuk earlier this year. We are going to take you to the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires, and we’ll move on from there.”

  He was referring to the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, Germany’s main agency for investigating Nazi war crimes. Demjanjuk, an auto worker in Cleveland, had been deported from the U.S. in 2009 and, at a trial in Munich in May 2011, had been found guilty of being an accessory to murder at the Sobibór death camp in Poland, where he was a guard during World War II.

  Brenner stared back. “I know who you are.”

  Johnson simply shook his head. He removed the SIM card and the battery from Brenner’s phone and tucked them all into his pocket. He assumed the CIA or the Mossad were tracking the SIM card.

  Johnson walked back out of the door, followed by Jayne. In the distance he saw the Jeep containing Ignacio and his guard pull up at the bottom of the hill next to the boat.

  The distant, tiny figures of the two men climbed out and boarded the boat.

  As soon as they were on, the boat’s engines roared, and it swept out into the river in an arc, heading upstream toward Paraguay on the opposite bank, leaving a large white wake frothing behind it.

  Just outside the garage, Luis lay unconscious on the ground next to a short wooden pole. “What happened there, with this guy?” Johnson asked Jayne as he felt for Luis’s pulse.

  Jayne pursed her lips. “Well, I saw him looking around in this area near the garage. I got the feeling he was checking for any backup you might have. When I heard voices rising inside, I thought I might be needed. So I sneaked up behind him and hit him with that pole. He never saw me. I obviously didn’t want to use my gun because everyone inside would have heard it.”

  Johnson gave a thin smile. Jayne had been, literally, a lifesaver on this trip.

  “Well, he’s still alive,” Johnson said. “We’ll tie him up, and the ambulance can deal with him as well.”

  Johnson stood. “I owe you one, Jayne. Ignacio was definitely going to kill the old man and me. It was a bad situation in there.”

  He glanced at Fiona’s phone. There were several text messages showing, which he scrolled down quickly. His eyes widened. “What the hell . . .” he said, as he digested the contents.

  “What’s that?” asked Jayne.

>   “These messages on Fiona’s phone. Looks like they’re from one of her Inside Track colleagues.”

  Johnson read on. “Apparently there’s a warrant out for the arrest of a very senior Democratic Party executive suspected of making an unauthorized multimillion dollar payment into a numbered account in the Bahamas—which belongs to Nathaniel Kudrow.”

  He scrolled down further, then read the details from the next message. “The FBI thinks it’s five million bucks. The guy’s gone missing. They think he was on a plane this morning heading for Paraguay. Apparently the FBI tapped his line, and he was overheard saying something about payments to Nathaniel in return for engineering David Kudrow’s withdrawal as Republican candidate. The first payment went through the same morning Nathaniel was stabbed to death but before the body was found. They found the cash in one of his bank accounts. They also uncovered text messages between the executive and Nathaniel referring to payments, including one from Nathaniel saying he’d done the job and the first transfer should be made. They’re asking if Fiona can call them urgently. It says her website hasn’t run a story yet, but it will.”

  Johnson shook his head. His mind worked overtime as he processed the information. So that was why Nathaniel had leaked the story. Philip’s words about Nathaniel at the Republican fund-raiser almost a month earlier came back to him.

  He was the one who suggested I put you on the guest list.

  No doubt he’d put Fiona on the guest list, too.

  Jayne’s bottom jaw had also dropped a little. “He’s betrayed his brother for five million bucks,” she said. “Are you sure you read it right?”

  “Looks that way. If we can get Fiona patched up, she’s got two world exclusives here.”

  He knew that despite Fiona’s earlier comments about needing “more proof,” there was more than enough to satisfy any editor or media lawyer, while publishing a big story about Brenner would make it much more difficult for the CIA or the Mossad to somehow secretly exfiltrate him.

  “Of course,” Jayne said. “Huge stories. The last Nazi, probably. You must be feeling as though you've done it for your mother. I remember what you told me she went through.”