Now the Rentners’ target was heading south down the cobbled part of Mauerstrasse, to the point where it joined Friedrichstrasse, next to Checkpoint Charlie, the old crossing between East and West Berlin where any non-Germans had to pass through during the Cold War period.
A crowd of tourists was bustling around the old checkpoint, taking selfies and photographs under the white sign: “You Are Now Entering The American Sector,” it read. Jones neatly dodged his way through the throng and ducked beneath some scaffolding that ran alongside a building on the right of Friedrichstrasse.
Johnson stuck to the right side of the street, following Jones, while Jayne tucked in behind the elderly couple, who made their way down the left side, past the historic white hut labeled US Army Checkpoint, with its old search lights, American flag, and sandbagged barrier.
Once past the Kochstrasse U-Bahn subway station, the crowds quickly thinned. Jones was moving more quickly now, and after another block he cut left onto Besselstrasse, then right through a park with rows of trees.
The elderly couple was hanging well back now since there was little cover, and Johnson did likewise. He could just about see Jones through the trees as he paused, lit a cigarette, and made another phone call, leaning on a tall gatepost as he did so.
Then he abruptly turned a right corner and vanished from view. By the time Johnson arrived at the corner, the elderly BND couple had also vanished. Jayne caught up with him a few seconds later.
“Where the hell have they gone?” Jayne asked.
Johnson shrugged. But then Gertrud emerged from the door of a small hotel about fifty yards farther ahead. She walked toward them and signaled that they should return to the park, off the street.
“He is in the hotel,” Gertrud said in her fluent English when they were all together in the park. “He is meeting another man. They are sitting in a corner in the bar. It is busy in there. But Otto and Maria are also in the hotel bar. It is fine. Maria will probably get a photo somehow—she is very good at doing that. And then they will follow the man afterward and find out where he lives. If Jones goes with him, they will report back.”
Johnson raised his eyebrows. Get a photo? Could that pair of pensioners really get away with following an MI6 officer trained in spotting surveillance for over an hour and a couple of miles, then sit near him in a hotel bar and still remain undetected?
“We should go now,” Gertrud continued. “We do not want him to see us when he comes out of the hotel. Our job is done. We can make any identification from what Otto and Maria tell us and hopefully from the photo too.”
Johnson worried that their target would inevitably realize what was going on—that would be another operation blown. However, he didn’t have much of a choice and needed to trust the team. He nodded to Gertrud and then Jayne, and they left the park together.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Berlin
It was late into the evening by the time the Rentners regrouped with Johnson, Jayne, and Vic in a small meeting room at the Limonenstrasse safe house.
Otto and Maria had written a short report, which they had already sent to Johnson, but they talked everyone through the events of the afternoon anyway.
It turned out that Jones and the man he was meeting had stayed in the hotel bar for only a short time before disappearing upstairs, presumably to have a private conversation in one of the hotel rooms without any danger of being overheard. It had not been possible to follow them because the entrances to the hotel’s corridors all required passkeys. They also had not been able to obtain a guest list and so didn’t know whether the room was booked in Jones’s name or the other man’s.
“Don’t worry,” Johnson said. “It would almost certainly be in a false name anyway.”
The two men had remained in the room for an hour and a quarter, Otto continued, at which point Jones had reappeared downstairs and immediately left the hotel by himself. Otto had followed Jones, leaving Maria behind, but the MI6 head of station had simply returned to his office. He had taken one of the taxis waiting near the hotel and Otto had managed to follow him in another taxi. Jones was dropped a block away from the British embassy and had walked the rest of the way.
Maria then took up the story. “I waited in the hotel reception area, and about ten minutes later, the man Jones was meeting came down and left the hotel. I followed.”
She had tailed him to the Kochstrasse U-Bahn station, near Checkpoint Charlie, where he had taken a U6 train heading south for nine stops to Westphalweg. Then he had jumped on a number 282 bus heading east for a few stops before getting off and finishing his journey on foot. He appeared to be living in a large house on Liviusstrasse. Maria gave Johnson the exact address.
“A house?” Johnson asked. He knew that people in Berlin tended to live in apartments, mostly rented.
“Yes. A two-story house. Chalet style,” Maria said. “It must be expensive. I do not know how much—maybe worth a million and a half euros. I do not know if he rents it or owns it, but either way, he must have money.”
“Interesting,” Johnson said. “You’ve done a great job. I really don’t know how you pull off this kind of operation.”
Maria smiled at the compliment. “I just imagine myself invisible. I am not there. I am unimportant. And of course, I use street craft. Years of practice. I changed my appearance twice this afternoon, you know. Once while waiting for the man to come out of the hotel and then again quickly in the U-Bahn. I was three different people.”
Johnson nodded. “And did you manage to get a photograph?”
Maria fished out her cell phone and showed Johnson two pictures she had somehow taken: one in the hotel reception area as the man walked out and another on the U-Bahn, showing him sitting in his seat scrutinizing his phone.
The picture showed a man with a full head of crew-cut black hair that was graying around the sides, and he had a slightly dark complexion. He was wearing a black leather jacket, zipped up to the top, and dark slacks.
Johnson studied the photo, then passed the phone to Jayne. “What do you think? Forties? Probably similar age to Jones, I’d say.”
Jayne took the phone. She sat up in her seat and frowned, examining the photo closely. “I would say that he’s one of those men who look younger than they are. Trendy haircut, but craggy face. I feel like I recognize him somehow, but I’m struggling to think exactly where from.”
Johnson glanced at her. She was rarely wrong about people’s faces. “Someone from when you worked here?”
“I’ve a feeling he was someone I tried to recruit, perhaps 1989 or 1990. I think he might have been one of several Stasi agents I was working on and didn’t make any progress with.”
“Stasi?” Johnson asked, surprised.
Jayne nodded. “Maybe.” She looked up at Maria and Vic in turn. “Can you send us these photos? We’ll run them through our system. And Vic, can we do checks on the address and find out who the owner is?”
Twenty minutes later, the photos had been dispatched to Nicklin-Donovan at Vauxhall Cross and to Langley along with a brief note from Jayne outlining her thoughts about the target’s possible background.
The MI6 team was the first to respond. A secure call some time later from Nicklin-Donovan to Vic informed him that facial-recognition analysis of the photograph and cross-checks against written files showed that the man was known to Vauxhall Cross: he had indeed worked for the Stasi during the 1980s.
Vic ended the call and turned to Jayne in mock rebuke. “You should have remembered his name. You contributed to his file in 1989 and 1990. It’s still all in the system. You did try to recruit him.”
Jayne scratched her nose. “His name?”
“Reiner Schwartz.”
A flash of recognition crossed Jayne’s face. “I remember him now. Yes. He was on my list because he had good access to the Stasi files at their HQ. I made no progress with him, though.”
The Stasi was the East German state security service—the secret police—who
were notorious for the extensive and repressive nature of their operations during the Cold War and who worked closely with the KGB. Their officers had been major targets for Western intelligence organizations who were trying to infiltrate the Stasi’s sprawling East Berlin headquarters at Normannenstrasse, about four and a half miles east of the Pariser Platz embassy.
The last update to Schwartz’s file had been two years earlier. It showed that for the past decade he had been a senior employee of the German Ministry of Defense—the Bundesministerium der Verteidigung. He was currently in its directorate for strategy and operations, one of the most critical parts of the organization, often working closely with the minister, the senior civil servant who ran the ministry, and the executive team. He had divorced eight years earlier, had no children, and lived by himself.
The reason for the update to Schwartz’s file, written by none other than Rick Jones, was that there was a suspicion he might be working for the SVR. The file note stated that Schwartz frequently traveled to Moscow, Kiev, and St. Petersburg for part of his role in the ministry and was therefore ideally placed to pass on information if he chose to do so or if he had been compromised and subsequently forced into doing so. He also visited other capitals in the former Soviet Union. But there had been no more recent entries in the file, and there was nothing to indicate that the BND had been informed of the suspicions.
Johnson found it astonishing. “Good to know that the German Ministry of Defense is finding space for a former East German Stasi officer. What the hell?”
“Don’t be surprised,” Vic said. “There’s a lot of ex-Stasi employees like him. Actually, there’s thousands of former Stasi in the German civil service. Reinvented themselves, and if they’d done wrong, probably argued they were only following state orders.”
“But if there have been more recent suspicions about him, why have there been no updates to his file, I wonder?” Jayne asked.
Johnson shrugged. “Maybe it’s because Jones had his own reasons for not doing so. If we can’t ask him why—at least not yet—we need to find out via Schwartz.”
“Not a problem,” Jayne said. “Let’s catch him outside the ministry building and ask him.”
“Very amusing. I was thinking of other methods.”
Johnson must have had a look on his face, because Jayne gave him a stare. “I hope you’re not thinking what I suspect you are.”
“What would that be?”
Jayne paused. “I don’t know. You sometimes go beyond the law when you don’t need to. Not his house?”
Johnson shrugged again and folded his arms. “Only for the greater good,” he said.
Vic gave a slight grin and looked away. “I’m not hearing this conversation.”
“I know you’re not. Keep your ears shut, buddy,” Johnson said. “And don’t say anything to Nicklin-Donovan. But I might need some equipment to help do what you didn’t hear. Also for the greater good, if required.”
“What? Don’t tell me,” Vic said. “A Beretta for you and a Walther for your good lady?”
“They would be a start, yes. And a few other items.” He began to run through a list.
Chapter Eleven
Monday, March 31, 2014
Berlin
The white Deutsche Telekom–branded van, complete with plastic tubes, a ladder, and a small satellite dish on the roof, looked no different from any other van belonging to Germany’s principal telecoms company as it crawled northward along Rixdorfer Strasse, took a right past a Croatian restaurant. and then a sharp left.
It moved along Liviusstrasse and pulled onto the side of the street about halfway along. The two people on the sidewalk, a man with a Doberman pinscher on a lead and an elderly woman pushing a shopping cart, took no notice as the driver killed the engine. Such vans were commonplace, and in any case, both people were more focused on staying upright in the face of a fierce March wind that was buffeting them.
But this van was the same vehicle that had been used for the surveillance operation on Gennady Yezhov prior to his assassination.
Johnson, the driver, made a quick call on his cell phone to Vic to confirm his arrival at his destination and, without turning his head, spoke to Jayne, who was ensconced in the rear of the van, out of sight.
“I’ll message you when I’m inside and then send an update every five minutes,” Johnson said. The plan was for Jayne to remain in the van, concealed from sight but able to keep a watch on the street outside using video cameras concealed in the plastic tubes attached to the roof rack. She could contact Johnson using a secure cell phone at any time.
After a lengthy debate, Jayne had accepted Johnson’s argument that entering Schwartz’s house was probably the fastest route to obtaining evidence of the kind they needed—and time was short.
Johnson picked up the Beretta M9 that Vic had procured for him from the weapons locker at the Pariser Platz CIA station, along with a Walther for Jayne, and pushed it down into his belt before covering it with his Deutsche Telekom jacket.
The Rentners surveillance team, who had been on duty since just after four o’clock that morning, had observed Schwartz leaving the property at about half past seven in his BMW 5 Series sedan, presumably to head into the Ministry of Defense building on Stauffenbergstrasse, about half an hour away.
Johnson put on his pink Deutsche Telekom safety helmet and zipped up his black jacket, climbed out of the van, and picked up a small plastic toolbox from behind his seat. He closed the van door, then made his way up a narrow driveway that ran up the side of the house to a garage at the rear. If challenged, his cover story would be that he had been sent to deal with a broadband failure.
When he drew level with the rear of the house, he turned right through a gap in the fence and along a path that led to the rear door. The layout of the rear garden was exactly as the Rentners had described: there was a fence that ran right up the left side of the property along the driveway, which protected Johnson from any observers. However, the right side was open, with just a low hedge and flower beds between Schwartz’s property and the one next door. The wind was blowing an array of daffodils almost to the ground and whistling through the hedge.
Johnson needed to work quickly and unobtrusively to ensure that no nosy neighbors called the police.
The Rentners had, helpfully, already checked that Schwartz’s house had no burglar alarm. It made sense, Johnson reasoned: he wouldn’t want the police poking around his property in case of a false alarm while he wasn’t there.
The team had also, under cover of darkness, established exactly what type of lock was on the rear door. It was of the modern pin tumbler variety, which for a skilled person was normally pickable using a tension wrench and a set of rakes. Indeed, Johnson often carried a small set in his wallet when working away on jobs, just in case they were needed, as they occasionally were.
However, using such tools was sometimes time-consuming and unpredictable. The previous year, a sympathetic locksmith friend in Portland, who had taught Johnson the finer art of lock picking over the years, had given him a set of eight bump keys of varying shapes and sizes. They were normal keys, but each of the V-shaped gaps between the teeth had been shaved down to the minimum. Johnson also carried a bump hammer, a small black tool with a rubber head attached to a handle by a slightly flexible metal neck.
Most tumbler locks consist of either five or six internal pins of different lengths, each with two parts that rest one on top of the other and with springs at the top to keep them in position. The teeth on a normal key, which are of differing lengths, push all the pins up to the same level—the shear line—at which point the key can be turned.
A small porch over the back door gave Johnson some cover, although he would have liked more. He pulled a pair of thin rubber gloves from his pocket and put them on, then tried three different keys, inserting them into the tumbler lock, until he found one of the correct length that fitted snugly. It was a six-pin lock.
Then he pulled the key out
one notch and removed the bump hammer from his pocket. He had practiced the technique at home until he was able to execute it swiftly and with minimum time wasted.
Holding the key in the lock between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, he rapped the end of the key hard with the bump hammer. The force of the blow, transmitted through the metal of the key teeth and the lower pins—the key pins—that were touching them, caused the upper pins—the driver pins—farthest away from the key to jump upward momentarily before being pushed back down by the springs.
The trick Johnson had been practicing was to apply just the right amount of slight rotational force on the key with his thumb and finger so that when the upper driver pins jumped above the shear line for that fraction of a second, he could get the key to turn in the lock.
As always, it took a few tries. Johnson hit the key five times before, on the sixth attempt, the key turned smoothly in the lock. He pulled the handle down, and the door swung open.
Johnson pocketed the key, stepped inside, and closed the door but left it unlocked. He found himself in a long open-plan room that contained a kitchen, a dining area, and, at the far end, a sofa and two armchairs. A set of double doors, secured by locks similar to the one he had just picked, led out onto some wooden decking that was shielded from the street by a wooden fence.
He knew he had limited time. There was no way of knowing when Schwartz might return or if any other visitor might come to the house.
Johnson glanced at his watch. Just over five minutes had gone since he had left the van. He sent a message to Jayne.
In.
The question was, where did Schwartz keep his documents, his computers, and other potentially helpful items? Moving carefully but as quickly as he could, Johnson decided to explore the floor he was on before heading upstairs. Apart from the large open-plan family room, there was a separate TV room with its window blinds pulled down that had a giant flat screen on the wall and an extensive speaker system. There was also a utility room and a further reception room lined with bookcases, three armchairs, and a well-stocked liquor cabinet.
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