“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 Three
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 th
e 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.”
Chapter Four
Friday, March 21, 2014
Berlin
To everyone’s relief, the CCTV camera feeds were restored twenty minutes before BLACKBIRD’s train, operated by České dráhy, the Czech railway company, was due to arrive at Berlin Hauptbahnhof. Johnson noticed, however, that given the tightness of the time frame, it hardly helped to reduce the tension in the van, which had been at fever pitch.
By then, the CIA team had reverted to their backup plan to use a street surveillance team to check that no suspect individuals were present either in the two railway stations through which BLACKBIRD was due to travel or in the street outside the Friedrichstrasse exit.
A squad of eleven innocuous-looking individuals, ranging from a tall hippy guy who appeared to be smoking something dubious to a smart-suited businessman and an old granny carrying shopping bags, were carrying out a continuous sweep of the entire route. Six photographs of bystanders, taken using smartphones, had been dispatched to both Langley and Vauxhall Cross for checking to ensure they were not on any register of suspected hostile operatives; all had come back negative.
Johnson stood and watched in silence as Vic and Neal ran through a final checklist to ensure that everything was in place.
Apart from the surveillance team, other watchers were in place at various fixed points for the entirety of the route that BLACKBIRD would take, including four bogus uniformed inspectors stationed at electronic ticket barriers and two vagrants. He would also be tailed by four of the team.
Jones, as handler, had put on a light disguise and left the surveillance van to wait in the rear of the bogus Berlin taxi, a cream-colored Mercedes complete with advertising slogans for one of the city’s hot night spots on the side and a yellow roof sign, which was parked farther north up Friedrichstrasse. The driver confirmed that he was ready to move and collect BLACKBIRD as soon as Neal gave the signal.
The taxi would then be escorted by three plainclothes armed motorcyclists to a lockup garage, large enough for all the vehicles to drive straight into. There BLACKBIRD would be thoroughly searched and checked for bugs or tracking devices.
Once the team was satisfied that he was clean, they would all continue to drive on to the safe house where Neal was based. Vic, Johnson, and the team in the Deutsche Telekom surveillance van would follow behind them at a discreet distance.
With five minutes to go before the train was due to arrive, Vic sent a secure text message to BLACKBIRD’s phone. Johnson sat down next to him and watched as he typed.
All clear. Proceed as planned.
A reply came back almost immediately.
Ok.
Vic leaned forward in his seat. “Mary, get me the video feed from the platform. Now, please.”
Mary clicked on one of the thumbnails. On the lower right screen, an image immediately appeared from platform eight, one of the tracks deep underground that served long-distance trains. It was constructed of silver steel and gray concrete and illuminated by strings of fluorescent lights overhead, and the only signs of color were the blue numbered signs and train information boards that were suspended above the platform.
“It’s the next train in,” Mary said.
A few passengers were visible on-screen, presumably waiting to board the train, which according to the board was continuing on to Hamburg.
“That’s Eric,” Vic said, pointing at a man dressed in jeans and a leather jacket with a small backpack
slung over his shoulder. Johnson had been introduced to Eric Tonner, a member of the CIA surveillance team, during briefings the previous day.
No one spoke.
Two minutes later, from behind the escalator that rose from the left side of the platform, three bright headlights appeared, growing rapidly larger on-screen as train number EC-170 from Prague glided into the station. The red engine at the front was followed by a string of cars painted in the white-and-blue branding of České dráhy.
“He’s in car E,” Mary said. “It should be center of the screen, all being well.”
The train came to a halt with a slight squeal of steel on steel, and seconds later, the electronic doors slid open.
Vic and Johnson leaned forward, elbows propped on their knees, cupping their chins in their hands, eyes glued to the screen.
There, just visible on the side of the nearest carriage to the camera, was the letter E. First out of the door were two middle-aged businesswomen carrying briefcases, followed by a man in jeans and a denim jacket carrying a large suitcase. Then came a couple of backpackers, and finally there appeared a man in dark trousers, a maroon polo-neck sweater, and a jacket, with slightly untidy black hair and black-rimmed glasses.
“Made it,” Vic said.
BLACKBIRD walked along the platform away from the camera toward the escalator, which he ascended until he was out of camera shot.
“Next,” Vic said.
Mary clicked on another thumbnail image, which showed BLACKBIRD continuing up another escalator and then along a walkway. She clicked again, and he next appeared on another platform, beneath a vast glass dome that sheltered the entire station complex from the elements.
There he stood near the platform edge, waiting patiently, quietly, and seemingly unworried amid a crowd of Berliners in their dark duffle coats or leather jackets, many wearing woolen beanie hats. Johnson noticed that Eric was visible several yards away in the top corner of the screen, busily tapping on his cell phone.
The Nazi's Son Page 3